Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth 0567041131, 2005041879, 9780567481030, 0567481034

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JOB AND THE DISRUPTION OF IDENTITY

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Job and the Disruption of Identity Reading Beyond Barth

SUSANNAH TICCIATT

T&.T CLARK INTERNATIONAL A Continuum imprint LONDON

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NEW YORK

T&T CLARK INTERNATIONAL A. Continuum imprint The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX

15 East 26th Street Suite 1703 New York, NY 10010

O Susannah Ticciati 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 567 04113 1 Library of Congress Catalogue-in-Publication Data Ticciati, Susannah. Job and the disruption of identity : reading beyond Barth / Susannah Ticciati. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-567-04113-1 1. Bible. O.T. Job-Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Barth, Karl, 1886-1968. I. Title. 233M06-dc22

BS1415.52.T53 2005

2005041879

Typeset by Data Standards Ltd, Frome, Somerset, UK Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall.

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction

vi viii 1

Part I: The Problem of Obedience: Barth on Job

11

1

Earth's Job as both Right and Wrong

13

2

Obedience as Self-Examination: Barth on the Story of the Rich Man

35

Part II: Does Job Fear God for Naught? A Rereading of Job

49

3

The Prose Narrative: Transforming Piety

53

4

The Poem

79

4.1 The Dialogue: Testing Integrity

80

4.2 The Whirlwind Speeches: Encountering Creation

101

Part III: God, Job and Justice

117

5

Calling God to Account

119

6

An Integrity Beyond the Law

139

Part IV: The Disruption and Transformation of the Self

159

7

The Problem of Obedience Revisited

161

8

Epilogue: Self, Society and World

183

Bibliography

191

Index of Subjects

197

Index of Biblical References

202

Acknowledgments

This book has emerged, not only from intensive engagement with Job and Barth, but perhaps more importantly, from conversation with friends and colleagues, to whose help, inspiration, patience and wisdom it is very much indebted. Thanks must go first of all to the two people who have had to bear with the process of its development the longest: Ben Quash and David Ford, my joint PhD supervisors. David has not only managed (by some dubious means) to hijack the word 'wisdom', he has also passed much wisdom on, something of which, I hope, has been embodied in this book. To Ben I owe, as well as many wonderful conversations, great attentiveness, support and patience. Much of the theology reflected in this book has been developed in conversation with Rachel Muers, whose encouragement and friendship has accompanied me throughout its formation. Above all, I'd like to thank her for being such a careful and perceptive listener, something from which I hope I have not only benefited, but also learnt. Mike Higton has given much time and energy to helping me with this book, not only in the proofreading stage (in which I have really appreciated his acuteness, meticulousness and even pedantry), but also in important, earlier conversations, which were crucial for my continuing in academic theology. Denys Turner's rigorous and persuasive thinking has been an inspiration from early on, and I am very grateful to him for all our conversations, whether in person or over email. For the tide of this book I am indebted to Chad Pecknold, whom I would like to thank, not only for this, but for the way in which, in the course of our friendship, he has helped me to think theologically. Thinking theologically is also something I have learnt in exchanges with Nick Adams, whose influence can be seen, not only where he is mentioned in Chapter 1, but more importantly in the introduction. I would like, next, to thank Daniel Hardy and Walter Moberly, my PhD examiners, both of whom engaged with my work closely and constructively. Dan's comments showed that he had grasped what I was trying to say almost better than I had! Walter's challenging and persuasive critique has led to further discussion between us which has had a profound effect on the shaping of Chapter 3. I am immensely grateful to him for the time and attention he gave to this. Particular thanks must also go to Oliver Davies,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Vll

Katharine Dell, Peta Dunstan, Diana Lipton, Andrew Macintosh and Peter Ochs, each of whom has offered me help at different stages. It was Diana who alerted me to the importance of the figure of the mokiach in the Hebrew Bible, which plays a large role in Chapter 5. I am extremely privileged to have had the opportunity of working with Georg Plasger while at the University of Gottingen. It was in discussion — and disagreement — with him that I was forced to a new level of insight and clarity in my understanding of Earth's theology. I am very grateful to him for all the time he generously gave to me, and delighted that our conversations have continued beyond the finishing of my PhD. And on returning to Gottingen after finishing my PhD, I was very pleased to be able to participate in Christine Axt-Piscalar's So^iefdt. I am indebted not only to their kind hospitality, but also to the energy and rigour of their theological thought. There are three further groups of people I would like to thank: first, the Scriptural Reasoners with whom I have worked, whose reading practices have informed and shaped this book considerably; second, my colleagues at Selwyn College, Cambridge, whom I am looking forward to getting to know better when this book is no longer my sole preoccupation! And third, my future colleagues at King's College London, who were happy for me to have a further year of research before taking up my lectureship. Others who have had a part in the thinking that went into this book include Emma Baldock, Jon Cooley, Ben Fulford, Christina Hoppe, Dan Neale, Elizabeth Prest, Make Rosenau and Elsa Tschape, who, as well as providing me with much-needed support and encouragement, have challenged and disrupted me in fruitful and unexpected ways. I am grateful, further, to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for providing the funding for my PhD. Some of the themes of this book have already been treated in an article entitled 'Does Job Fear God for Naught?' appearing in Modern Theology^ July 2005.

Abbreviations

CD

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (13 vols. and index vol.; eds. G.W Bromiley and T.F. Torrance; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956—77). [English translation of Die Kirchliche Dogmatik (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947—70).]

Commentaries ANDERSONFREEDMAN

Francis I. Anderson, and D.N. Freedman, Amos: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (eds. WE Albright and D.N. Freedman; Anchor Bible, vol. 24A; New York: Doubleday, 1989).

BLOCK

Daniel I. Block, The Book of E^ekiel (2 vols.; eds. R.K. Harrison, R.L. Hubbard, Jr.; The New International Commentary on the Old Testament, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997-1998).

BROWNLEE

William H. Brownlee, E^ekiel 1-19 (OT ed. J.O.W Watts; general eds. DA. Hubbard, G.W Barker; Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 28; Texas: Word Books, 1986).

CLINES

David J.A. Clines, Job 1-20 (OT ed. J.O.W Watts; general eds. DA. Hubbard, G.W Barker; Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 17; Dallas: Word Books, 1989).

DHORME

E. Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job (trans. H. Knight; London: Nelson, 1967).

DRIVER

S.R. Driver, The Books of Joel and Amos with Introduction and Notes (4th repr.; ed. A.F. Kirkpatrick; Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges; Cambridge: CUP, 1907).

DRIVER-GRA^

S.R. Driver and G.B. Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job: Together with a New Translation (eds. S.R. Driver, C.A. Briggs, A. Plummer; International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1921).

EICHRODT

Walther Ekhrodt, E^ekiel: A Commentary (trans. C. Quin; The Old Testament Ubrary\ London: SCM, 1970).

ABBREVIATIONS

ix

GOOD

Edwin M., Good, In Turns of Tempest: A reading of Job (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

GORDIS

Robert Gordis, The Book of job: Commentary, New Translation, Special Study (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978).

HABKL

Norman Habel, The Book of Job: A Commentary (Old Testament Library, London: SCM, 1985).

HARPER

WR. Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea (eds. S.R. Driver, C.A. Briggs, A. Plummer; The International Critical Commentary, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1905).

POPE

Marvin H. Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation and Notes (The Anchor Bible-, New York: Doubleday, 1965).

ROWLEY

H.H. Rowley, Job (2nd edn; New Century Bible Commentary, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980).

STUART

Douglas Stuart, Hosea-]onah (OT ed. J.O.W. Watts; general eds. DA. Hubbard, G.W Barker; Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 31; Texas: Word Books, 1987).

WILDBERGER

Hans Wildberger, Jesaja 28—39: Das Buch, der Prophet und seine Botschaft (eds. S. Hermann and H.W Wolff; Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament, 10.3; Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1982).

WOLFE

H.W Wolff, Joel and Amos: A Commentary on the Books of the Prophets Joel and Amos (trans. W Janzen et al\ ed. S.D. McBride, Jr.; OT eds. EM. Cross, Jr., K. Baltzer et aL; Hermeneia — A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible', Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).

7IMMERL1

Walther Zimmerli, A. Commentary on the Book ofF^ekiel (2 vols.; trans. R.E. Clements and J.D. Martin; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979-83).

Dictionaries BOTTERWECK

BDB

G.J. Botterweck, and H. Ringgren (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (14 vols.; trans. J.T. Willis; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977-2004). E Brown, S. Driver and C. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000).

x

JOB AND THE DISRUPTION OF IDENTITY

RGG

K. Galling and H. von Campenhausen (eds.), Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handworterbuch fur Theologie und Religions-mssenschaft (6 vols.; 3rd edn, Tubingen: Mohr, 1962).

VANGEMEREN

Willem A. VanGemeren, (ed.), New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (5 vols.; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997).

Journals CBQ

Catholic Biblical Quarterly

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

/R

Journal of Religion

Int

Interpretation

JSOT

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

JTS

Journal of Theological Studies

MT

Modern Theology

VT

Vetus Testamentum

VTSup

Vetus Testamentum Supplement

Bibles AV

King James Version

RSV

Revised Standard Version

Unless otherwise indicated, citations of the Bible are taken from the RSV (with slight emendations), except in Chapters 1 and 2 where they correspond to those found in the English translation of the Church Dogmatics. Approximate transliterations of the Hebrew are given in brackets where it is considered helpful for the non-Hebraist. Where the Hebrew and English verse numbers differ, I give the Hebrew in brackets.

Introduction

'There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.' So opens the book of Job, introducing its central character as one who is perfect ( tarn), or better, as one of integrity. It is in a suspicious questioning of this same integrity that God's adversary in the heavenly court, the Satan, later asks, 'Does Job fear God for naught?' (1.9). In what follows I offer an interpretation of the book of Job that takes these verses together as its hermeneutical key. The principle agenda of the book is conceived accordingly to be a critical exploration and reappraisal of the concept of integrity, interpreted most fundamentally, as in the question posed by the Satan, in terms of a relationship to God 'for naught'. This is to shift the emphasis from what is most often seen as the burden of the book — the problem of evil or unjust suffering — to the problem of obedience, sanctification, or transformation of self before God. Not that the former is not addressed; rather, it is only through an investigation of the true nature of human obedience that an adequate theodicy — as a description of God's involvement in a world corrupted by evil and suffering — can be developed; a theodicy that asks, most fundamentally, 'Who is the God who is to be feared for naught?' In the face of a whole history of interpretations that, however varied in other ways, have by and large located the heartbeat of the book of Job in the problem of evil,1 this shift in focus is a radical departure to say the least. However, it is not only because of its potential to open up new interpretative avenues that I take this apparently bold step; it is also in the belief that the theodicy approach to the book, in all its radically and subtly differing forms, has been pursued to the point of exhaustion, while there nevertheless remain depths of the book unplumbed. The need for a new anchor point to pursue 1. I reter above all to modern literary, philosophical and scholarly interpretations. For a survey of classic interpretations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see N.N. Glatzer, The Dimensions of Job: A Study and Selected Readings (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). There are exceptions to this dominant approach, e.g. Soren Kierkegaard's interpretation (see Fear and Trembling Repetition; eels, and trans. Hong and Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 197ff.). In this book, as well as drawing on the biblical scholarly tradition of Job interpretation, I will engage with Karl Earth's commentary in CD IV.3, which also strikes an exceptional note within the plethora of modern interpretations.

2

JOB AND THE D I S R U P T I O N OF IDENTITY

the never-ending task of plumbing these unplumbable depths is indicated, in particular, by three intractable and persistent problems that the book of Job poses for any theodicy approach. One of the most puzzling features of the book of Job is its division into a prose frame (prologue and epilogue) and a lengthy poem that forms the body of the book. Apart from the obvious text-historical problems that arise in this connection,2 no interpretation can avoid contending with this division and its various implications for the meaning of the book as a whole. It is in relation to this division that problems start arising for the theodicy approach. First, there appears, for a theodicy approach, to be a rift between the prologue and poem in terms of subject matter. In the prologue the concern is Job's righteousness, put to the test by God at the provocation of the Satan. This, in turn, sets up the situation which gives rise to the discussion between Job and his friends in the poem: does God allow the righteous to suffer, and if so, why? The poem's concern, in other words, is theodicy. However, in the light of this problematic the prologue is rendered at best trivial, at worst absurd. On the one hand, it does no more than set up the situation discussed in the poem. On the other, it gives the answer to the problem in advance by providing the hidden cause of Job's suffering: suffering is inflicted on unknowing individuals for the purpose of God's wager with the Satan. And given the absurdity of this answer, it is almost invariably explained away as part and parcel of the folktale-like quality of the prologue, which is thereby emptied of any substantial meaning. The second problem is posed by the epilogue, which from the point of view of Job's well-being appears simply to portray a return to Job's prosperous beginnings. However, this would seem to serve only to undermine, or at least blunt, the radical nature of the insight of the poem: that righteousness is not necessarily rewarded with prosperity, and that one does not have to have sinned to be visited with hardship. Job, who has proved righteous, is in the end rewarded for being so; the doctrine of retribution, for which the friends had argued against Job (according to which the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished), is apparently reinstalled. The poem is thus limited to a painful interlude, and its plaintive question rings out only within these bounds/ 2. The theoretical variations are endless, some arguing for the poet's utilization of a traditional tale as a frame (GORDIS), some for unity of authorship, but allowing for a Job legend which precedes both prose story and poem (ROWLEY, CLINES), others for the later addition of the prose frame to the poem (B. Zuckerman, Job the Silent: A Study in Historical Counterpoint (Oxford: OUP, 1991), pp. 26-27, 157-165), and still others for both strands within the prose story which precede the poem and strands which post-date it (K. Dell, The Book of job as Sceptical Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 199—203) — to mention just a few. 3. It is possible to argue that the epilogue forms the necessary conclusion to God's wager with the Satan. Job's suffering was the result of his being put on trial, and in the epilogue this trial comes to an end (ROWLEY). However, this serves only to highlight the incompatibility between the prose frame and the poem: the former, in its concern with the trial of Job's righteousness, must bracket the problematic of the poem, in which God is the one on trial.

INTRODUCTION

3

A third, perhaps more far-reaching, problem that arises for a theodicy approach to the book of Job has to do with the nature of its expectation. The poem portrays a righteous Job suffering. In the throes of the dialogue between Job and his friends this inevitably gives rise to the question 'Why? Why do the righteous suffer?' The theodicy approach adopts this question as its hermeneutical key and thus looks to the book for an answer. The structure of the book apparently supports this reading, the poem being divided approximately into a dialogue between Job and his friends on the one hand, and speeches from God out of the whirlwind on the other/ which is all too easily read as open-ended questioning followed by definitive answer. What better way of underlining the authority of the answer than by putting it in the mouth of God? However, when one approaches the Whirlwind speeches with such heightened expectation, one inevitably comes away disappointed. Not only do they fail to provide a well-thought-out answer to the problem, they do not even seem to address the issue the dialogue has raised. Suggestions as to the import of the speeches offered in defiance of this hopelessness appear simply as attempts of cunning on the part of the interpreter to rescue the text from obscurity. Viewed as a theodicy, the book constitutes a struggle with an age-old problem which does indeed provoke deep reflection, but which when scanned for answers can only offer us banalities. The goods the book produces under the auspices of this approach do not seem to fulfil its promise. Perhaps, therefore, this is not the most fruitful approach to the book of Job. That the book is open to other avenues of interpretation is confirmed by Karl Earth's provocative commentary,' which focuses on the fascinating problem of Job's obedience - a concern I will take up from a rather different angle in my own interpretation. The compelling nature of Earth's interpretation is in part demonstrated by the unusual yet elegant way in which he handles the three problems outlined above. It is clear, on the one hand, that in his concentration on the question of Job's obedience Earth has put his finger on something which is of fundamental significance for the book. On the other hand, from the commentary's greater context in the Church Dogmatics and in Earth's theology as a whole, it becomes apparent that Earth is wrestling, in the form of Job's obedience, with a problem concerning the 4. A theodicy need not take the form of this question with its implicit goal of justifying God. It may have the more modest aim of a description of God's involvement in a world full of suffering and evil. Although modest, this second way may turn out to be a lot more complex, involving a deeper and more far-reaching inquiry. Indeed, the first may be considered a degenerate version of it. It is only this degenerate form, being the typical form a theodicy approach to the book of )ob takes, that I am calling in cjuestion here. 5. This overlooks the problematic Elihu speeches which come between the dialogue and the Whirlwind speeches and can thus be viewed either as an unfruitful extension of the dialogue, raising the stakes for the Whirlwind speeches (GOOD) or as a foretaste of the Whirlwind speeches, pointing the way to them (I-IABKL). 6. To be found in CD IV.3.1; §70, 'The Falsehood and Condemnation of Man', pp. 368-478.

4

JOB AND THE D I S R U P T I O N OF IDENTITY

nature of obedience which has much wider resonances in his own theology (and perhaps even in the Protestant tradition out of which his theology emerged). Job is thus caught up in a problematic endemic in Earth's theology. Moreover, this is a problematic which, within the confines of Earth's theology, and consequently within his Job interpretation, finds no satisfactory solution. While shedding new light on the question of Job's obedience, Barth is unable to do justice to the dimensions of the book concerned with Job's nature as a human being set in history, bound up in complex psychological and social structures. In his abstractive approach, he has no way of talking about Job's growth and development. The radical nature of Earth's insight turns out to be inseparable from a corresponding degree of reductionism. However, it is not Earth's reading of Job through the lens of his own theology (and the fact that this prevents him from seeing certain aspects of the text) with which I want to take issue. It is this, after all, that affords him such insight into the text. If Earth's interpretation is deemed to be unsatisfactory, then the way in which it is so is far more subtle. The question to be tested in what follows is whether Earth's interpretation takes the form, not simply of a one-sidedness, but more harmfully of a closing-down of the text's possibilities. Does the theological conceptuality arrived at in his interpretation serve to explore and open up the text, or rather to replace it? Is his interpretation, in other words, a true Auslegen (explication), or rather a form of Weglegen (explaining away)? Without deflecting from the greatness of Earth's theological insight, the conclusion is unavoidable in what follows that Earth's conceptual tour de force has the effect, at least to some extent, of explaining away the text. The challenge I therefore set myself is to reopen the book of Job to deeper exploration without losing the boldness and freshness of Earth's insight. In regard to the three problems set out above, I hope to resolve them without the sort of closure entailed in the solution offered by Barth. As an important aspect of my attempt to reopen the book of Job, I avail myself of an approach which plays little or no role in Earth's interpretation — that of biblical scholarship, involving pursuits such as philological work, close literary analysis, research into the history of the text's formation, its original setting, and its relation to other contemporary texts. The thrust, in other words, is towards the origins of the text. In relation to theological and philosophical readings of texts, this is one of the significant approaches available to us today for holding open the text in its complex particularity, for it has the critical function of bringing one back to the detail of the text. In relation to the specific form of abstraction to which Barth is prone, 7. Barth does refer to some of the results of biblical-scholarly research in his commentary on Job (e.g. p. 384), just as he does elsewhere in his exegesis. But it is clear in this case that they are not integral to his argument. On the contrary, he proceeds with his argument in a way that bypasses such results, not allowing them to get in the way of his theological insights. 8. In a very different way Lectio Divina might be seen as accomplishing something similar.

INTRODUCTION

3

moreover, a biblical-scholarly approach has the merit that it highlights the humanness of the text, locating it in a specific context, recognizing its complex human origins etc. If taken seriously, this, in turn, should encourage an attentiveness to the humanness and historicity of the characters and events delineated within the text. However, if the danger of an exclusively conceptual approach is the replacement of the text, the danger of an approach focused exclusively on the historical-critical unearthing of the origins of the text is that it might prevent a use of the imagination in relation to the text by chaining one to it instead. Each approach, in other words, is in need of the other (or something functionally similar) as a corrective, and it is for this reason that I have as my aim to bring them into dialogue with each other. More specifically, I aim to bring Barth into dialogue with an approach that at least in this case he carefully side-stepped — an approach which itself has fairly consistently avoided him. In practice, the interplay between the conceptual-theological and the biblical-scholarly in my interpretation of Job is more complex than this schematic representation suggests. The sketch I have just given can only serve as a pointer to the particularity of what goes on in practice, the contours of which I will now briefly outline. Throughout, my aim is a rediscovery of and renewed attentiveness to the historical, social and psychological dimensions of the book that did not come to expression in Earth's interpretation — not as a way of displacing his approach, but in order to repair and deepen it. After an analysis of Earth's interpretation in Chapter 1, I turn in Chapter 2 to another part of the Church Dogmatics where I find the resources for a new appreciation of the dimensions of Job not registered by Earth, namely Earth's commentary on the story of the rich man in Mark 10.17—31 and parallels. Here also Barth struggles with the problem of obedience. However, something emerges which was not present in his reading of Job: a concept of self-examination as a particular description of obedience to the divine command. This concept has the developmental dynamic that Earth's interpretation of Job lacked. It accompanies my journey back into Job, being fruitfully unpacked in ways not anticipated by Barth. In Chapter 3 I relocate Job in its intrascriptural context, reconsidering the prose narrative in the context of the Deuteronomic tradition, interpreting it specifically in terms of the Deuteronomic Covenant. This is, from a biblicalscholarly point of view, a controversial and bold move. In relation to Barth, however, it has a slightly different function. In his reading, the prologue and epilogue are understood as representing Job's 'pure relation' to God. They portray the eternal and eschatological as opposed to the temporal and historical. The historical-critical work I do in relocating Job within the 9. To be found in CD II.2, chapter 8, 'The Command of God', pp. 613-30. 10. This is developed in the section following the commentary, §38.1, 'The Sovereignty of the Divine Decision'.

6

JOB AND THE D I S R U P T I O N OF IDENTITY

Deuteronomic Covenant has the effect of resisting Earth's eschatological reading by insisting on the genuinely historical nature of Job's relation to God in the prose narrative. It is in consideration of the poem in Chapter 4 that I take up Earth's notion of self-examination, developing it in psycho-philosophical terms. The psycho-philosophical discourse turns out to be an appropriate framework within which to explore the movements of the poem, lending itself to an explication of the dimensions of the text concerned with Job's obedience as a psychologically and socially complex human being, caught up in the currents of history. In doing so, it directs us to an important aspect of what the book of Job is about: Job's development, as we will discover, is above all an inward journey, a wrestling with his identity which takes him deeper and deeper into a true recognition of his integrity. This exploration provides a transition to chapters 5 and 6, which offer a closer analysis of the Hebrew text in biblical-scholarly terms, concentrating on some terms and passages significant for our understanding of Job's development, investigating their wider scriptural resonances, and in particular their legal and prophetic dimensions. These chapters function as a translation of Chapter 4 into a Joban idiom, and as a further rooting of Job in its intrascriptural context. By this point, we have come a long way from Earth on Job. The prominent Barthian categories of freedom, knowledge, truth etc. have been succeeded by terms like justice, integrity, searching, even wisdom — the sorts of terms one might associate with Job when considering it as a book of Wisdom literature. For the non-Hebraist these chapters might present something of a challenge. However, the detailed work undertaken here must not be viewed as peripheral to the book's overall argument; on the contrary, it constitutes an indispensable moment within the larger interpretation — in ways I hope are becoming clear in this introduction. To this extent it is worth persevering! To return to my previous schematic representation, it is in chapters 5 and. 6 that the resistance of the particularities of the text to theological-conceptual assimilation is most clearly felt. That a 'gap' remains between the biblicalscholarly discourse of these chapters and the theological conceptualities used elsewhere is inevitable. Indeed, it is precisely this gap that prevents the text from being swallowed up — and replaced — by the concepts used to interpret it. However, this does not mean that the two discourses are not brought into relation with one another. There is a third discourse, the psychophilosophical, which mediates between the other two: as I have mentioned, this effects the transition from the theological-conceptualities in chapters 1 and 2 to the biblical-scholarly of chapters 5 and 6 by providing a framework within which to analyse the details of the text, without wholly leaving behind the concepts and concerns of Barth. Its capacity to mediate lies in its nature as a non-biblical conceptuality (i.e. its provision of another context of 11. I.e. fully temporal and embodied.

INTRODUCTION

7

meaning) which nevertheless grasps an important aspect of what the book of Job is about; it is, in other words, at once conceptual and closely descriptive. In Chapter 7 I emerge from this long re-immersion in the text of Job that has taken us from Chapter 3 to Chapter 6, in order to draw out its theological implications. I began with an analysis of the theological concepts that Barth develops to expound the book of Job. I then went through and beyond these back into the book of Job, implicitly rcsubmitting them to the rigours of the text itself. What has happened to them in this process? Do they come out changed? Chapter 7 constitutes a response to Barth in the light of my reading of Job. More than this, however, it constitutes the development of an alternative conceptuality in which the problem of obedience, as found within Earth's theology, gains a more satisfactory solution. As mentioned, this problem takes the form of an inability to do justice to history. More specifically, Barth works with a division between the eschatological and the historical, the eternal and temporal, which makes it impossible for him to talk about human obedience in developmental, teleological terms. Job, for Barth, is obedient in his eschatological relation to God (portrayed in the prose narrative), disobedient as a fallible human being (whom we encounter in the poem). That Job is nevertheless established as obedient within the poem is only due to his ever-present hidden eschatological status before God. His obedience as a human being within history is reducible to the status conferred upon him as one eschatologically elected and justified by God. The problem Barth sets before us is not one which he alone has had to tackle. The specific form it takes in his theology is an index of a more general problem found more widely in the Protestant tradition to which Barth belongs, having its root in the tenet of 'salvation by grace alone'. This can lead, as it has done here, to a disjunction between the human being as sinner, embroiled in the complexities of history, and the same human being as one who is saved in faith and has a new life hidden in Jesus Christ, which cannot be perceived by the historical eye. According to this tenet, grace, in its utter gratuity and presuppositionlessness, founds something entirely new, albeit in a transformation of the old. The sinner and the one who has been saved are indeed the same person, but it is hard to see how this unity is more than a mere postulation. It therefore seems inevitable that such all-encompassing grace give rise, in what might be compared to a sort of creatio ex nihilo, to a disjunction between two realities, which we might call old and new creation. We are then plagued by the question of the connection between the two. It is this disjunction that is reconfigured in the course of our journey through Job. job's obedience — his integrity before God, as we come to know it — is discovered to be inseparable from his historical being. Conversely, depths of historical creation emerge that themselves bear the marks of the eschatological. Job's integrity, partaking of both the historical and the eschatological, undermines Barth's disjunction. In terms of the doctrine of salvation by grace, Job's integrity; his justification, is not something which

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JOB AND THE D I S R U P T I O N OF IDENTITY

remains aloof from him, saved up for him in eternity but alien to his historical being. It is also historical reality. This is not to limit its 'newness', however, implying an understanding of grace as a tinkering within history which leaves the basic structure of creation intact. There is no domestication of grace, as Barth might have feared. What we discover in Job is that historical creation itself has depths that break out of its own structure, depths that Barth did not recognize. These, as they partake also of the eschatological, are the utterly gratuitous and presuppositionless workings of grace. In Chapter 7 I conceive of these depths of creation in terms of the self as elected by God. Both a biblical and a psycho-philosophical concept of Job's self have implicitly emerged in the course of chapters 3 to 6. In Chapter 7 I develop this concept theologically. The self proves to be a multidimensional terrain on which the different discourses in which I engage are intimately interrelated. It therefore provides at least the beginnings of an alternative conceptuality to Barth's almost monolithically theological vision, as well as a response to the problem of obedience: obedience, rooted in Job's self, is not only eschatological, but psychological, social and historical. This alternative conceptuality remains a sketch, serving to outline the new possibilities that might be opened up in relation to Barth's theology if the dimensions of Job that he overlooks were to be taken seriously. It raises the question, however, of the extent of the disruption which a renewed attention to these repressed dimensions might cause. Is Barth's theology left intact by its re-immersion in Job, or is a fundamental revision of his theology required? As intimated, however, this understanding of obedience, although developed as a response to a specifically Barthian problematic, has more far-reaching implications. Consider the following alternative accounts of obedience. The one starts off from the disjunction between a person as sinner on the one hand, and as justified by faith on the other — from Luther's simul iustus et peccator. The identity between the two is established, or at least witnessed to, in certain acts of obedience in which the sinner conforms to her being in faith, although she never has this being in and of herself. These acts can be understood as the keeping of particular commands, discernible as God's will within the flux of history. The other account, which one might label the 'mystical', conceives of obedience, which might more appropriately be called sanctification, in terms of a gradual transformation of the person — a gradual overcoming of sin in which the person approaches oneness with God. Here there is no absolute disjunction between sinner and person of faith. Rather, the sinner grows in faith, gradually gaining, through spiritual exercises and such like, a new being. My account of obedience, reached through a reading of Job, takes a different path from each of these, sharing, nevertheless, in aspects of both. Obedience, on this account, is rooted in the self as elected by God, which is at once historical and eschatological. The self, as described above, is the depths of creation which constantly break out of the given worldly structures, just as Job explodes the constructions of the friends. His obedience or

INTRODUCTION

V

integrity is this disruptive movement, which I will later conceive in terms of a probing of the self. As in the 'mystical' account, obedience is inherently developmental, as a journey deeper into the self. However, in contrast to the new being of the sanctified person, the being of the self only exists in the movement of disruption - it is intrinsically historical. This is due to the fact that something of the disjunction between sinner and person of faith is retained, but in terms of the rather different disjunction between the self and the worldly structures whose bounds it breaks. This likens my account in some respects to the understanding of obedience as act. However, in contrast to the latter, it is not a matter of particular acts of obedience to God's command, but of a growing into the self — a historical emergence of the self. The category of history that is developed here cannot be reduced to the categories of act or being. There is an emphasis, rather, on process. If we take another look at what is involved in the accounts of obedience as act and as being, we shall see more acutely what is at stake. In the account of obedience as being, the underlying question might be put as follows: 'How am I to be transformed? What am I to become?' The emphasis is on result, on the nature of the transformed person. In the account of obedience as act, the underlying question might be: 'How am I to act? What is God's will for me in this situation?' Again, the emphasis is on result — the result of a process of deliberation, in which I reach a decision of how to act. It is in this respect that my account differs most profoundly from each of the others: it emphasizes process rather than result. Obedience is constituted by a movement of probing, by a historical process which is irreducible to the results of the process. It is the process itself which is important. This is profoundly counter-cultural in a society which puts so much emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge as opposed to the learning of wisdom; on the finding of answers as opposed to a grappling with questions; on the achieving of goals rather than an enjoyment of the path leading to them; on the acquisition of commodities of all kinds (from stocks and shares to academic qualifications, from life-style accessories to 'transferable skills'); in sum, on anything that can be assessed, quantified and 'packaged'. To return to the book of Job, this is precisely the problem with the theodicy approach. It seeks an answer to the problem of evil and expects Job to deliver it. And it is correspondingly disappointed when it discovers only more questions. The book of Job does not deliver us answers. It leads us on a journey of transformation, disrupting the very way we construe the questions. To be transformed by it in this way, we must enter into a certain relationship to it. In other words, its 'content' demands a corresponding hermeneutic; or better, a corresponding ongoing practice of reading. As I have outlined above, it is not a matter of reaching a set of concepts that can take the place of the text, but about an ongoing interaction with the text. The interpretation I offer is intrinsically dynamic. Starting with the conceptualtheological and moving through the psychological and the biblical-scholarly, it

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emerges in a transformed theological conceptuality. However, it is not this result which is important so much as the long process leading up to it. Rather than summing up the text in such a way that we can leave it behind, all it achieves is a pause for reflection which will ultimately send us back into the text, undergoing yet another transformation. This, moreover, is what happens in Chapter 8, in which I end on an exegetical note with an interpretation of the hymn to wisdom (Job 28) that reopens and transcends the conceptual closure that was provisionally reached in Chapter 7. The introspective characterization of the self reached by my investigation of Job up to this point is here broken open by a relocation of the self in the wider context of the embodied material world. The category of wisdom takes over from that of self-examination, pointing to a yet more expansive understanding of the nature of obedience.

Parti The Problem of Obedience Barth on Job

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1 Barth 's Job as both Right and Wrong

When we reach Earth's commentary on the book of Job, we are already in the third part of the fourth volume of his six-million-word dogmatics. What kind of voice can Job have in this overwhelming context? Job is, for Barth, ca type of Jesus Christ, a witness to the true Witness.'1 His commentary is developed within the larger context of an exposition of Jesus Christ as the true Witness and his encounter with the falsehood of humanity. It is impossible to deny that Barth reads Job through the lens of an already highly developed theology, even if one can argue about the nature of this theology and the room within it for innovative exegesis. The more important question, however, which itself has implications for the nature of his theology, is whether the reading of Job within this theological framework affords Barth a genuine insight into the book of Job. My contention is that it does, and it is on this basis that I have chosen to take Barth's commentary as the starting point for the development of my own interpretation. To demonstrate this claim is the first aim of this chapter: I hope to show, not only that Barth has perceived something of real significance in the book, but that this perception goes hand in hand with a compelling and elegant reading of the book as a whole, which makes good sense of some of Job's most puzzling features. Given this, my second aim is to explore the more subtle question of to what extent Barth's insight into the text, rather than opening up the text's possibilities for the reader, in fact ends up by closing them down. To what extent, in other words, does the conceptual elegance of his interpretation amount to conceptual closure? Does his insight, rather than leading the reader deeper into the particularities of the text, end up by replacing them? This will be a difficult, perhaps impossible, question to answer in any objective or ultimate way. However, to have it in mind as a question while investigating his commentary will make us particularly alert to that commentary's dynamics. It will also prepare for the following chapters, in which I have as my goal to re-enter the book of Job in an exploration which will explode any conceptual closure that Barth may in fact have reached.

1. CD IV.3, p. 388.

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OF I D E N T I T Y

1 The Key to Earth's Commentary and its Context within his Theology As mentioned above, Barth locates his commentary on Job within an exposition of Christ as the true Witness and his encounter with the falsehood of humanity. This already points to what is fundamentally at stake for him in the book of Job, which is also where the novelty of his commentary lies: the problem of obedience. Job, as a witness to this true Witness, exists in the sphere dominated by falsehood, of which his friends turn out to be paradigmatic representatives. Thus Job is understood, in contrast to his friends and their disobedience, as the one who is obedient in spite of the falsehood that surrounds him on every side; that even penetrates his own being as one who cannot escape this situation. It is this 'obedience in spite of that constitutes the problem of obedience as it were — how Job can be right even though he is also wrong, in the language of Earth's exposition. And the complexity of the problem is brought out further in the intricate and disconcerting subtlety of the distinction between the obedience of Job and the disobedience of the friends. If they are wrong, as they are, it is in such a way that they are also right, just as Job is right in such a way that he is also wrong' (p. 454). Before turning to this problem in the distinctive form it takes in Barth's reading of Job, it will be necessary to outline the theological structures within which it emerges and becomes such a virulent problem. The commentary on Job falls within the doctrine of reconciliation, which spans three part-volumes (plus a fourth on ethics) that follow and have their basis in Barth's threefold Christology: Christ as God; Christ as man, and Christ as God-man. This Christology involves the narration of a history — the history of the atonement, which in each part-volume is narrated from a different perspective. In this threefoldness, Christ is the event of reconciliation. 'He is the history of God with man and the history of man with God.' As such, however, his history is 'the most basic history of every man. It is the first and most inward presupposition of his existence'. As this particular event, therefore, Christ is true, universal history. Talking about the second form of this history, Barth says: For what was it that really took place in the event which we then recognised and described as the homecoming of the Son of Man, as His elevation and exaltation to fellowship with God ... ? Was it just the isolated history of this one man? This is certainly the case, for what took place . . . in this One was and is only, as the reconciliation of man with God by God's own incarnation, His own history and not that of any other man. But for all its singularity, as His history it was not and is not a private history, but a representative and therefore a public. His history in the place of all other men and in accomplishment of their atonement; the history of their Head, in which they all participate. Therefore, in the most concrete sense 2. CDIV.l,p. 158. 3. CDIV.l, p. 157.

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15

of the term, the history of this One is world history. When God was in Christ He reconciled the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5.19), and therefore us, each one of us.

In that it narrates from three different perspectives this history of all histories, the doctrine of reconciliation forms the core of Earth's dogmatics, and its Christological basis the core of this core. Jesus Christ is the true reality in which each person has her true existence. This basic 'ontology' of Earth's theology has wide-reaching implications. With it, Earth sets himself apart from the view that one can distinguish between an objective reconciliation accomplished once for all in Christ and its subjective appropriation by the rest of humanity; between that which is available in Christ as possibility and its becoming actual for each human being.5 For Earth, what has taken place in Christ already includes the rest of humanity within it, bringing about an immeasurable alteration in its situation, and is therefore in no need of completion 'outside' him. There is no outside. It is in this sense that Christ's history is universal history: it is the ultimate reality, within which our lives take place. Earth thereby overcomes the distinction between objective and subjective reconciliation. However, what he effects by doing so is, not an eradication of all distinction, but rather a shifting of the boundary. If the gulf lay previously between Christ as the one who makes reconciliation possible and us for whom he has done so, but for whom it must first be actualized, a gulf opens up for Earth 'between "Jesus Christ for us" and ourselves as those who in this supremely perfect word are summoned to regard ourselves as those for whom He is and acts.'6 We, in other words, are those who still inhabit the sphere of the unreconciled world. How can we recognize ourselves, then, as those who have been reconciled to God in Christ? There is a gulf between true reality in Christ and our apparent reality in which the transformation effected in Christ seems yet to have taken place. This gains a powerful turn when Earth roots it in an interpretation of Luke 5.8: 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.' The sphere of the unreconciled world is that in which the human being, as sinner, can only be against God. The reconciliation accomplished in Christ is that in which the CD IV.2, p. 269. See CD IV. 1, pp. 284-85. CD IV.l, p. 286. It is the threat posed by this gulf that leads Richard Roberts to claim that the inclusion of our histories within the one universal history of Christ, of time in eternity, results in a temporal structure locked up in itself which fails to make contact with 'the shared and public reality of the world in which we live' ('Karl Earth's Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implications', in S.W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Earth: Studies of his Theological Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 88-146 (145)). This, he claims, is not the fulfilment, but the annihilation, of time, concluding that Earth's theological creation 'hovers above us like a cathedral resting upon a cloud' (p. 145). The conclusion I come to below in my analysis of Earth's commentary on Job, if not as devastating as this, at least shares its concern. 8. See CD IV.l, p. 290.

4. 5. 6. 7.

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sinner who is against God is brought to her end: there is no more place for her; she can only perish. Thus, her confrontation with the Lord in whom this reconciliation has taken place can only mean her destruction. In this confrontation there are ctwo orders (or, rather, order and disorder), two opposite world-structures, two worlds opposing and apparently excluding one another': my being in Christ and the being I still find myself in; what I will refer to as the eschatological and the historical. This distinction is fundamental to Earth's theology. It is the reason why he needs, at the end of the Christological section that forms the beginning of each part of the fourth volume, a subsection providing an 'Ubergang or transition to his discussion of the 'anthropological sphere'. These bridgesections11 establish and prove the identity between the ones Christ has reconciled to God and ourselves as part of the still-unreconciled world: between 'us in Christ' and us; between the eschatological and the historical. The question I will press in my analysis of Earth's commentary on Job, where this problematic emerges most forcefully, is to what extent the positing of an identity serves in practice only to confirm and reinforce the distinction. It is in this connection that the problem of obedience arises. In short, obedience describes the shape of my relationship to God as reconciled in Christ. As such, it is an eschatological quantity. The sphere of the unreconciled world — my historical existence — is by definition opposed to God. How, then, can obedience be possible within it? 2 Earth's Commentary on Job: Its Threefold Structure Earth's commentary on Job falls into four parts which correspond to the threefold exposition of the true Witness and the account of falsehood which follows. The encompassing paragraph, 'The Falsehood and Condemnation of Man' (§70), corresponds in the other part-volumes to the paragraphs, 'The Pride and Fall of Man' (IV. 1, §60) and 'The Sloth and Misery of Man' (TV.2, §65), treating sin from a third and final viewpoint. Each of the paragraphs has a similar structure, considering sin first of all in the light of its overcoming in Christ, from which can be derived, second, the specific nature of the sin that has been overcome, and third the fate of the sinner. However, Earth's distinctly threefold exposition of the true Witness in IV.3 has no exact parallel. 9. CD IV.l, p. 290. 10. Denoted by this distinction is the opposition between true reality 'in Christ' and reality as we experience and perceive it. The eschatological, true reality is that which is at present hidden, but will be revealed at the end of all things. The historical entails all that is bound up in our present messy reality, however this may be described, recounted and understood. This should not imply, however, that true reality for Barth is ahistorical. 11. §59.3: 'The Verdict of the Father'; §64.4: 'The Direction of the Son'; §69.4: 'The Promise of the Spirit'. 12. CD IV.3, pp. 383-88, 398-408, 421-34, 453-61.

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17

The explanation for this might be found in the following: Barth recounts, 'And I will admit that secondarily I have had before me in this field a noteworthy figure in the witness of the Old Testament who will be with us throughout the discussion. This figure is Job' (IV.3, p. 383). Indeed, we will discover that the threefold structure of his exposition corresponds to a threefold 'division' within the book of Job, thus functioning at the same time as a hermeneutical principle. Is the unparalleled nature of Earth's exposition, then, a sign that it has in fact been structured around his reading of Job? We might even take Barth at his word when he says, 'If, then, I recall certain passages [of Job] at the appropriate points in the section, it is less by way of illustration and more by way of indicating the actual sources of my whole line of thought' (p. 384). I will briefly outline the structure of Barth's exposition of the true Witness. Christ is the true Witness in virtue of the unparalleled relationship in which God exists to him and he to God. In this relationship he is the truth: the true reality which constitutes the 'inner presupposition' of all existence. Barth considers this relationship first of all in its 'pure form', the form in which God alone sees Jesus Christ — its eternal aspect. Characteristic of this is the freedom in which God turns to this man on the one hand and the freedom in which this man offers his life up to God on the other. Each has the other as his only presupposition: 'God is true God as the God of this man and man is true man as the man of this God' (p. 383). It is the freedom, in other words, of election^ in which God elects Christ at the beginning of all things in an act of self-determination. " God chooses to be the God of Christ. There is an asymmetry here, but one which, rather than limiting the freedom of Christ, creates space for it: at work is an inclusive understanding of God's sovereignty. This fundamental relationship sets up the structure within which all humanity is to relate to God, depicting the shape of obedience. I will return to it below. In this pure form, however, Christ is known by God alone. To us humans he is revealed, by contrast, in a form appropriate to the historical sphere in which his revelation takes place, and to us sinners as its recipients, i.e. 'as the wholly Rejected, Judged, Despised, Bound, Impotent, Slain and Crucified' (p. 390). This is the form of suffering, in which the pure form in which he exists before God alone is present only in concealment. Barth is keen to insist that such a distinction does not imply separation. For it is not that Christ appears only to us in our history in this form — he is also 13. Cf. B. McCormack, 'Grace and Being: The Role of God's gracious Election in Karl Earth's theological Ontology', in J. Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barf/j (Cambridge: CUP, 2000): 'election [for Barth] is the event in God's life in which he assigns to himself the being he will have for all eternity. It is an act of Self-determination by means of which God chooses in Jesus Christ love and mercy for the human race and judgement (reprobation) for himself (p. 98). McCormack goes as far as to suggest that 'we [must] see the triunity of God logically as a function of divine election . . . The decision for the covenant of grace is the ground of God's triunity' (p. 103).

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present to God as such. He is the truth also in this form, behind which there exists no further, more ultimate truth. Nevertheless, in this distinction between the pure form and the form of suffering, we are confronted anew, and in the starkest of manners, with the gulf between two opposing worldstructures: between the truth of election, which is also the truth of reconciliation, and the unreconciled world within which this truth must proclaim itself. Finally, Barth considers the true Witness under a third aspect: as one who speaks. The true Witness is one who, even within the sphere of the unreconciled world, makes himself known as the truth. He does so by speaking as only God can out of the silence of death, he alone being beyond this end and limit. But he does so, therefore, in the terrible isolation this entails, as one rejected not only by fellow-humans but also by God. His freedom to speak, in other words, is one constituted by suffering. Under this third aspect, then, the first and second come together. The power of the Crucified to speak establishes their identity, the implicit locus of which is the resurrection. The originality of this structure stands out in comparison with Barth's discussion of what was at base the same gulf in the 'transition'-sections from the Christological to the anthropological sphere in each of the first three partvolumes of the doctrine of reconciliation. There he moved from a discussion of Christ's person and work, through the transition-section, to the anthropological sphere, the transition establishing the validity of this movement from Christ to us on the basis of the resurrection. The resurrection is also the basis of a 'transition' here, but this time providing a link between the first two aspects, in whose juxtaposition the gulf is already evident: between election and cross; or more widely between election and history. As will become apparent in the commentary on Job, this allows the gulf to emerge in a more concrete and explicit way, raising the stakes of the problematic.

3 The Disjunctions within the Joban Text and the Dynamic of Veiling/Unveiling This threefold structure of Barth's exposition of the true Witness has its hermeneutical counterpart in the 'disjunctions' within the Joban text: in the first place between the prose narrative that frames the book and the poem that forms its centre, and then within the poem between the dialogue of Job and his friends and the Whirlwind speeches from the mouth of God. Any interpretation of Job is faced with the problem of these disjunctions, or must at any rate recognize that the text is constituted by these disparate elements, however they may then be connected. How it grapples with these dislocations will in fact turn out to be decisive for the resulting interpretation. They are, as it were, the hinges on which the book turns.

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19

The prologue and epilogue are understood by Barth as depicting the pure form of Job's relation to God, in which he is a type of Christ. Key for Barth are on God's side the wager in which God pledges his own honour into the hand of Job, making his own cause the cause of this man and thus accepting 'such total solidarity with him as to compromise Himself (p. 385); and on Job's side the 'for naught' (1.9) in which Job gratuitously serves God and thus proves himself truly to be the 'servant of God' to whom God had entrusted himself — this is his obedience (p. 385). As in the case of Christ, the relationship is characterized on both sides by freedom: it is not out of obligation towards him but for the sake of his own good pleasure that God singles out Job, choosing to be God as the God of this man; and in his service of God, Job for his part has no presupposition other than God, offering himself to God for the sake of God alone. The material blessings lavished on Job by God and the corresponding acts of obedience offered up by Job are for Barth the outward expression and sign of this fundamental solidarity, making it transparent. However, this transparency is one which exists for God alone, just as the pure form of the relation between God and the human being is seen and known by God alone. This is, in a sense, the crux of Barth's understanding of the prologue and epilogue. For their 'embodiment' of the pure form is necessarily to be conceived eschatologically — as Job stands before God eternally in the transparency of his election, justification and sanctification. It is precisely this transparency that is lost when the relation is surrendered to the currents of history — which is exactly what happens in the poem. Thus for Barth, the prologue and epilogue stand to the poem as the eternal to the temporal, the eschatological to the historical, the transparent truth to its radical concealment. In this respect, Barth has taken his cue from the 'folktale'like quality of the prose narrative, the historically enigmatic Uz, for instance, as a sort of contextless context, being taken as a licence to extract Job from his historical context and consider him solely in relation to God. The material dimension of the prologue and epilogue is thus divested of its historical quality. We are left with the crucial question of what becomes of this pure form as it is submerged in the historical reality of the poem, in which the relation between God and Job assumes the form of suffering. This is, in fact, the problem of obedience. In the prologue and epilogue we beheld Job's free service of God — his obedience — in all its transparency. How does this obedience, which has so far been understood eschatologically, become manifest within history, where the transparency of the pure form is lost? What, in other words, is the 'form of obedience appropriate to [this] partial action of his history with God' (p. 406), this change in form effected in the shift between prologue and poem? This is, for Barth, the urgent and focal question of the book of Job, resulting from the way in which he has set up the relation between prose narrative and poem, allowing the former in its concern with Job's righteousness to set the agenda for the poem also.

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The dynamic set up is one of veiling/unveiling. The pure form is concealed and obscured in the form of suffering. However, as the secret of Job's existence (cf. pp. 388—89 in relation to Christ), it is preserved in and with Job's relation to God in this new and unrecognizable form: it is manifested in its concealment. In this change in form, c[it] is not that [Job] does not remain the same. As the same both in God's relationship to him and his to God, he will later reappear in the pure form which for the moment is concealed, and is thus in some way maintained and demonstrated even during the concealment' (p. 398). This sameness is key — but it also begs the question: Job must adopt a form of obedience that manifests, or witnesses to, his true status as the servant of God, even while the form adopted necessarily obscures it. Barth construes this manifestation within concealment, unveiling within veiling, in terms of Job's simultaneous right and wrong. As we will discover, the ultimate identity of Job-in-his-form-of-suffering with Job-in-his-pure-form is established in the Whirlwind speeches, in which the dilemma of Job's right and wrong is grounded and addressed. For now, however, the gulf looms large. Earlier in the doctrine of reconciliation, Barth was concerned with the gulf between our new being as inaugurated in Christ and ourselves as those who are promised this new being, establishing in the transition-sections that we can indeed talk about this new being with the knowledge that it really applies to us. Here, Barth is concerned with the gulf within one person, the person of Job. The problem is thus brought out in all its acuteness. We have a confrontation within Job between his being before God — his status as a servant of God (implicitly, his being in Christ) — and his being within history. In what sense is Job, within this history in which he can only be against God, also for God, his obedient servant? The identity can no longer simply be established formally. Because we are dealing with the concrete history of a particular person, it is necessary to show how it is that Job is obedient within this history — how this history is a particular form of his being as God's servant. This is done in terms of Job's simultaneous right and wrong, to which I now turn.

14. This trope of Earth's theology has its roots at least as far back as CD I.I (esp. §8.2, where Barth's concern is the Trinitarian nature of God's revelation). In reference to Barth's concept of revelation as developed in volume I of the CD, R. Williams notes the 'awkwardness of a scheme which so divorces the substance of revelation from its historical form' ('Barth on the Triune God', in Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth, pp. 147-93 (153)). Although Barth is insistent on their inseparability, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, according to Williams, that the historical circumstances of the event of revelation are accidental and only arbitrarily related to the divine act (pp. 153-57). This is, in the relation between the pure form and the form of suffering, precisely the problem we face here - what I have called the problem of obedience. Barth must show how the form Job's history takes manifests, even while it obscures, his eschatological relation to God (in Williams's terms, the substance of revelation). Whether he manages, and thereby overcomes the problem he faced already in CD I.I, will be the test of what follows.

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4 Job's Dilemma: The Problem of Obedience Revisited The change that occurs in the poem in the form of Job's relationship to God gives rise for Job to a dilemma consisting 'in the conjunction of his profound knowledge that in what has happened and what has come on him he has to do with God, and his no less profound ignorance how far he has to do with God' (p. 401). This conflict forms the essence of Job's pain, and (in that it leads to his great complaint against God) is the matter in which he is both right and wrong. Job is right insofar as he recognizes that it is still his God who appears to him in this alien form, thus acknowledging God's freedom to adopt this alien form as such. However, Job can no longer recognize in this alien form the familiar contours of his own God, with whom he existed in a relationship characterized by blessing on the one side and righteous obedience on the other. And on the basis of this known relationship, he demands that God put off his alien form, revealing himself once more as the God Job knows him to be. Job holds up this his preconception of God as a standard to which God must conform, thus denying God's freedom to be God in the other form in which he now appears. This constitutes Job's wrong. The dilemma would seem to arise from Job's inability to relate to God in the absence of any preconception of who God is. God's incomprehensibility is simply unpalatable to Job, causing him to oppose to it his own conception of their relationship. This is what prevents an unequivocal acknowledgment on his part of God's freedom, which is a freedom from all preconceptions. Job's complaint, then, does not arise from the simple fact that God has withdrawn his blessing, but rather from what lies at the root of this withdrawal. In appearing to Job in a form in which he is no longer 'the one who blesses', God appears to Job in a form which he can no longer understand and which is thus apparently arbitrary. 'He does not enquire concerning the one with whom He has to do, concerning his guilt or innocence. He disposes and rules quite simply in accordance with the infinite right of His infinite might in the face of which man can only maintain a horrified silence, or break out into violent protest, but concerning which he cannot speak with God since God will not allow this' (pp. 403—04). The essence of Job's complaint, then (to use the language I will take up in the following chapters), is that God cannot be called to account; that in respect of this change in form, 'there can be no controversy with God' (p. 404). In this way, God's freedom can only appear to Job as arbitrariness — and it is this that causes him such profound suffering, just as it is this that puts him so inexorably in the wrong. Presupposed in this account of Job's right and wrong is an understanding of the falsehood of humanity as that which characterizes the sphere of the unreconciled world (historical reality). As is already becoming clear, Job's 'ignorance', his wrong, is not of a dogmatic kind. It is not, in other words, something which could be corrected by extra information or

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knowledge.1 Rather, it is the result of his existence within the sphere of falsehood and thus something from which he cannot be extricated. His obedience can only take the form of this dilemma: his right is inseparable from his wrong. Hence no amount of extra information could help him. Earth's account of falsehood is set out in a separate subsection in which he deals specifically with Job's friends. It will nevertheless be helpful to draw upon this now, because it is against such a background that the problem of obedience comes concretely into view. Falsehood arises in relation to the truth of Jesus Christ, as the untruth which opposes itself to and resists the truth. It is a distortion and domestication of eschatological reality. As we have seen, eschatological reality is characterized by a relationship between the free God and the free human being. God encounters the human being 'in absolute independence of all presuppositions distinct from Himself ... More positively, He does so as Himself the presupposition of all presuppositions'. Again, 'man is left no possibility of encountering God from a position which is not that posited and secured for him by God Himself through His Word and Spirit' (p. 446). The relation is therefore one of absolute asymmetry: all human freedom and autonomy exist within the sphere of God's freedom and autonomy, and derive entirely from them. Thus, while God's agency is characterized by initiating, the human's is characterized by receptivity7 and responsiveness. But this is in no way to deny its real agency, or to reduce it to something like 'mere receptivity' in contrast to an active account of agency (which would then be applied to God). It is simply to contextualize in a specific way this agency as a whole. Indeed, to construe human agency as within God's is precisely to preserve it in a non-competitive and non-coordinated relation with God's. Asymmetry, in other words, creates space for full human agency and freedom by the fact that it rules out any possibility of such competition or coordination. 15. Pace Nicholas Adams, 'Argument', forthcoming in D.F. Ford, B. Quash and J.M. Soskice (eds.), fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studiesfor the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), pp. 137-51. According to Adams, 'Barth thinks, in essence, that Job makes a dogmatic mistake: Job fails to acknowledge that God's sovereignty matches God's righteousness' (p. 143). This is put right in the Whirlwind speeches, in which God asserts the identity of his sovereignty and goodness. My account of the Whirlwind speeches will differ dramatically from this. As I will endeavour to show, the conceptual resolution of Job's conflict that Adams finds in Barth's account of the Whirlwind speeches is precisely the kind which is reached, not here, but by the friends. 16. This logic of asymmetry is a pervasive theme of the Dogmatics, developed by Barth, for example, in 'The Word of God and Experience' in CD I.I, §6, in a construal of divine determination as the determination of human self-determination. See also John Webster, Earth's Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), in which Webster provides precisely such an account of the relation between divine grace and human agency in interpretation of Barth's ethics. He understands Barth to '[break] the rules of modernity, according to which, as Kathryn Tanner puts it, "freedom and power are had by the creature only in independence from God's creative agency for them'" (p. 18), in 'a refusal of an

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It is this absolutely asymmetrical relation that becomes problematic within historical reality — the sphere of falsehood. Falsehood is the attempt at its systematization and coordination and thus the denial of the free God and the free human being and the free relationship between them. This attempt arises from humanity's inability to live in this rarified atmosphere bereft of all supports in relation to God. Where God was the only presupposition, there is sought a principle superior to and comprehending both God and humanity according to which they are placed in a relation of coordination and coexistence. To return to Job's dilemma, Job's 'knowledge', his right, is his recognition and acknowledgment of God's freedom, and his 'ignorance' its denial. As pointed out above, this denial is not a dogmatic or cognitive mistake. Implicit in Earth's formulation, rather, is a subversion of the language of cognition itself. As transcendent of all presuppositions, God's freedom is not something which can be acknowledged cognitively. Indeed, the very attempt to cognize it (which, as we will see, is what the friends do, replacing God's living freedom with a timeless concept of it) entails its denial - owing to the systematizing nature of cognition itself. Ignorance is predicated, in other words, of cognition in its entirety; falsehood is the 18 corruptive nature of cognition as such. As we will see in the contrast between Job and the friends, God's freedom cannot be grasped cognitively; it must be wrestled with. To sum up, historical reality — the sphere of falsehood — is a systematic distortion of true reality — of the free relation between the free God and the free human being. For this reason, if the latter is to become present within the former, it can only do so insofar as it is veiled. It can only be manifested in concealment. The polemical edge of this account of the relation between historical and eschatological reality becomes apparent when we view it from a independent ealm of human being apart from God's Word . . . [and instead] an emphasis that being human means active existence in the context of God's history with humanity' (p. 36). 17. For this reason, although this relation characterizes eschatological obedience, its noncompetitive structure cannot provide an answer to the problem of obedience within history. Webster overlooks this when he moves uncritically from a 'correspondence' between the freedom of God and the freedom of humanity within it (between divine grace and human agency) to a 'correspondence' between the great acts of God and the little acts of humans in history (see Ethics, pp. 197-99). 18. Even if Earth's discussion of falsehood involves a subversion of the language of cognition, his explication of sin in its culminating and most virulent form as falsehood would still seem to place undue emphasis on the cognitive dimension of sin. This should not be understood reductively, however. Tim Gorringe, in Karl Barth. Against Hegemony (Oxford: GUP, 1999), spells out the culturally and politically contextual nature of Earth's theology, thus locating the sort of systematization against which Earth fought in the hegemonies then prevalent as the 'motors of society'. Freedom, in Earth's terms, must be understood as liberation from these societal hegemonies. See Earth's The Christian Life (trans. G.W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), where Earth gives these societal forces the name of 'the lorclless powers' (§78.2). His account there might be seen as an enfleshment of the more purely cognitive account of falsehood in 1V.3.

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slightly different perspective. When their relation is envisaged in terms of veiling/unveiling, there is a tendency to regard historical and eschatological reality as parallel realities. However, as the sphere of the unreconciled world, historical reality is also that which is to be reconciled and transformed. Eschatological reality is the transformation of historical reality — something which becomes clearer when they are renamed old and new creation. It would be possible to envisage this transformation as something which takes place gradually within old creation, parts of which approach and eventually become the new. It is in relation to such an understanding that Barth's account stands out in its radicality That new creation can only be veiled within the old entails that it can never be identified with part of it. The transformation of the old can therefore never be understood in terms of any distinction made within it. Rather, in the event of its transformation, all its own possibilities are relativized: old creation is shown to be characterized not just in part but as a whole by its attempt at systematization. This is its structure. New creation is something totally new in relation to this, something unimaginable within the terms of the old, being characterized by a freedom which could never be conceived systematically. Hence it can never be present to and in the old within the terms of the old. Rather, new creation can only be present to the old on its own terms and thus in a way that is invisible to, but which nevertheless confounds, its systematization. It is sui generis, being itself its only presupposition, and thus cannot be coordinated with the presuppositions that make up old creation. It can only break out of the system. In this sense, new creation may be likened to a creatio ex nihilo in relation to the old. But this places us precisely before the central problem. If new creation cannot be present to the old in terms of the old, how then is it to be manifested in the old at all? How, in other words, is the pure form manifested in the form of suffering? How is Job's eschatological obedience manifested in the form of his obedience appropriate to this change in form? Indeed, what is the form of obedience appropriate to this change in form i.e. to old creation? In other words, such manifestation must by definition take place within old creation and therefore in a way that is perceivable in its terms — this is what it means to say that there is a form of obedience appropriate to the old. If this were not the case, the 'transformation' of the old would remain an eschatological event enclosed within itself. For the act of veiling would bring about the new in the midst of the old without in any way affecting the old, and therefore constituting the new without any actual transformation of the old. Old creation would in this way be completely bypassed, entering into no concrete relation to the new. This would effectively mean that no real veiling had taken place, and this at root because no unveiling had actually taken place. All this is to say that the distinction between obedience and disobedience must have a 'phenomenal' dimension (i.e. one perceivable in terms of old creation). For the act of veiling must result in a perceivable transformation within old creation, in a form of obedience that arises against the background

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of the prevalent disobedience. But have we not also already said that the transformation of old creation into new cannot be understood in terms of a distinction within old creation? and correspondingly, that the distinction between obedience, as a quality of new creation, and disobedience, as characteristic of the old, equally cannot be understood in terms of such an immanent distinction, but rather only as an 'eschatological' distinction, which itself relativizes any immanent distinction? On the one hand, no phenomenal distinction between obedience and disobedience is possible. On the other, such a distinction must be made. This is the problem that we, together with Barth, face. 5 Earth's 'Solution' and its Root in the Whirlwind Speeches And Barth's 'solution' is worked out in terms of the dilemma in which he finds Job — as simultaneously right and wrong, obedient and disobedient. It is this dilemma that distinguishes him, as ultimately obedient, from his friends, as ultimately disobedient. But what kind of solution is this and how far does it get us? I will begin to answer this by looking at the way in which Barth in fact distinguishes between Job and his friends. The friends, according to Barth, are the paragon of falsehood. At base, this means that they seek to deny the free God and the free human being and consequently the free relationship between them. They do not believe in the possibility of a 'for naught' either on the part of Job or on the part of God. Where Job confronts this freedom in all the horror and arbitrariness in which it appears to him, they look away; they domesticate it. Barth says of Job: 'In trying to hold fast to God, and actually holding fast to Him, as the One who acts in this way, how can he understand or acquiesce in the concealment in which He now encounters him, in His existence as Deus Absconditus? Yet how can he reject this concealment without making himself guilty, even in his clinging to the Deus revelatus, of knowing better than God, of being more just than He, of hurling defiance against God for the sake of God?' (p. 422). The friends show us, on the contrary, precisely what it would mean to acquiesce in the face of this concealment. For where Job seeks controversy in the hope of calling God to account, the friends refuse it. It is not simply that they claim to be able to explain God, thus denying outright the manifest incomprehensibility and arbitrariness of the form in which God has appeared to Job. Rather, they transform this incomprehensibility itself into a concept — a concept which can be wielded and manipulated in order to blunt, indeed to defend one against, the real incomprehensibility of the living God. They do this insofar as they invoke God's 'unfathomability' as an explanation of Job's suffering and therefore as a reason to acquiesce. In so doing, they transform God's free act of taking a different form into the timeless truth that 'God is free to take any form', rendering this freedom harmless and thus losing sight of the really free God. Ironically, then, they do what Job refuses to do: 'to transform God in this incomprehensible form into God in a comprehensible'

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(p. 406). God's true incomprehensibility is incomparable to any such concept of it, being that in which God 'disposes and rules quite simply in accordance with the infinite right of His infinite might', thus appearing to Job in 'the strange and terrifying form of a relentlessly aggressive adversary before whom he is completely defenceless' (p. 404). In contrast to any tame concept of the friends, this incomprehensibility is thus something frightening, powerful and ultimately abusive, touching Job at the heart of his existence where there are no more defences. As living rather than cognitive, the only way to do justice to it is to wrestle with it as Job does. While Job refuses to shy away from, but instead boldly and persistently faces, the terrible freedom of God, the friends domesticate and deny it. At its heart this is a distinction between clinging onto the living God whatever the consequences on the one hand, and erecting defences against this living God on the other. It could not, it would seem, be clearer or greater. However, Barth is careful not to let this distinction be drawn in any facile or obvious way. For just as Job is only right insofar as he also puts himself in the wrong, the friends are wrong only as they speak in the garb of truth (p. 457). 'Is this really human falsehood? In these three fine men do we not have those who in their own way are also genuine witnesses?' (p. 455). The falsehood of the friends is not so easy to detect. And where the friends do in actual fact fall — in their inability to encounter the freedom of God in the absence of any preconceptions by which they may contemplate and thus prescribe this freedom — does not Job also fall? Has he not requested, even demanded, that God conform to his own preconception of who God is, opposing 'to this [alien] form of God the right of the relationship in which God stands to him and he to God' (p. 402)? The fact remains that the living God is present to Job, and Job to the living God, in a way in which is not the case with the friends. But does not this alert us to the fact that the distinction between Job's obedience and the friends' disobedience is not one secured in and of itself, on its own terms, but rather is first established only by an act of the living God? At the end of all these human words ... we are simply left in a blind alley from which there can be no exit except by the intervention and protest of a higher, indeed, of the supreme power. Before this intervention and protest, we are in no sense prepared to accept that Job is not only in the wrong but is also justified' (p. 398). Again, Job is not disqualified as a witness to the truth on account of his fault, 'because God himself throws His own weight into the scales, dispelling the fault of Job, causing him to give up the conflict, and enabling him to experience, see and know to what extent he has to do with Him' (p. 401). The question of Job's right or wrong, and consequently of the distinction between him and his friends, thus awaits this decision of God in the Whirlwind speeches. It is from this point that the distinction is both made possible and is in fact made. God, in his speeches, declares and indeed establishes (in the sense that his decision could have been different - he is not obliged to justify Job) the unity

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of his being as Yahweh — the pure form in which he is known to Job, and his being as Elohim-Shaddai — the alien form in which he is unknown to Job. God thus declares and establishes the unity of the pure form of his relation to Job with the form of suffering in which this relation appears in the poem. He thus asserts retrospectively that he has indeed been present to Job even in this alien form, that this form really was the result of a partial action in their common history, hence that Job's behaviour was in fact a form of obedience appropriate to this partial action, and that in this Job truly clung and held fast to the one against whom he raised his defiant complaint. Job's justification thus comes from God's retrospective decision to be present to Job even in this form as his enemy, which constitutes Job as the servant of Yahweh. It is only because Yahweh holds onto Job during the radical concealment of the poem that Job's complaint constitutes his holding onto Yahweh, and thus proves even in this concealment that he is still the servant of Yahweh. Job's justification is thus received solely from God. And indeed he is not justified without also being put in the wrong by God — as wrong to have rejected Yahweh in this form. This justification is, as it were, his creatio ex nihilo as the elect of God. It is in this act of liberation — itself an expression of God's freedom — that God resolves Job's dilemma. This decision of Yahweh, in that it is also an act, indeed a free act (as the decision to be present to Job in his complaint), does not so much represent a new step in his history with Job, but has rather a retroactive effect on the totality of Job's complaint. Indeed, it entirely changes the nature of this complaint, constituting it as Job's holding onto God. This is the paradoxical dynamic of the relation between God's speeches and Job's complaint. Its paradoxical nature does not end here, however. For Job's complaint is seen to be even more fundamentally bound up with God's speeches. Job's demand that Yahweh declare and reveal himself even in the being and action of his as Elohim-Shaddai has its basis in his knowledge that in this alien form he does indeed have to do with Yahweh, and so in his acknowledgment that Yahweh does have the freedom to assume this alien form. His rejection of God in this form presupposes his acknowledgment that God has taken on this form. His complaint is thus based in a knowledge and recognition of the unity7 of 19 Yahweh with Elohim-Shaddai. But this unity is only first established in God's speeches, as these constitute the free act and decision of God. Job's complaint thus has its basis in these speeches: 'in its immanent endlessness it can neither begin nor continue without clinging to the One to whom and against whom it is directed with the certainty, grounded in Him alone, of His decision not only against but also for the man who hopes and trusts in Him' (p. 425). 19. Quite apart from the fact that the Whirlwind speeches are properly to be viewed as a decision and act rather than as the provision of dogmatic information, it is quite clear from this, pace Adams, that they can in no sense be held to provide new knowledge that Job previously lacked.

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The Whirlwind speeches, then, do not simply change the nature of Job's complaint retroactively, but actually give rise to this moment of obedience within the currents of history in which it takes place. They are, in other words, God's act of veiling, which as his decision to be present to Job in the form of his enemy, gives rise to the corresponding form of obedience appropriate to this historical sphere (i.e. old creation). As a result of this veiling, Job's decisions, acts and being as part of this history are caused to point beyond themselves to his status as the servant of God, and thus to the pure form of his relation to God. This is the dynamic of his obedience, which fundamentally consists in an act of witness to that which is concealed, but in this way also revealed, in the alien form of his relation to God. This is what distinguishes Job from the friends — that he is caught up in this dynamic of witness to his relationship to the free God. How, in conceptual terms, does this present a solution to the problem posed above? To recall, the problem ran as follows: on the one hand, if the new is to constitute a true transformation of the old, the act of veiling must result in a perceivable transformation within old creation; on the other hand, the transformation of the old into the new cannot be understood in terms of a distinction within the old. Earth's solution is to draw upon the grammar of witness. The act of veiling does indeed give rise to a phenomenal distinction: Job complains while the friends do not. However, this distinction does not itself constitute the distinction between the old and the new. The latter depends rather on God's decision to be present to Job in his complaint. The phenomenal distinction, to which this decision gives rise, can only witness to this decision — to the presence of the new. The transformation of the old into the new, in other words, gives rise to a distinction within the old without being reducible to it. 6 The Inadequacy of Earth's Interpretation A cogent argument is put forward by Mike Higton that Earth's Church Dogmatics is ultimately fuelled by attentive exegesis of the Bible.2 Moreover, Higton argues that this attentiveness is made possible by the very logic of Earth's theological vision; more specifically, by what Frei has called Earth's figural imagination. This imagination sees every instance of a relationship between God and creation as a figure of the relation between God and humanity in Christ. The figural relation, however, is grounded solely in God's providential plan, such that there is no 'quality' of the creature that is presupposed by it. This has the unexpected result of actually freeing up creation to be thoroughly particular, rather than being considered reductively as a carrier of such a 'quality'. '[History] is freed from an unbearable burden; 20. Mike Higton, 'The Fulfilment of History in Barth, Frei, Auerbach and Dante', in M.A. Higton and J.C. McDowell (eds.), Conversing with Barth (eds. J. Webster, et al.\ Barth Studies; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 120-41.

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it is freed from having to be the ground of the ways of God, it is freed to be itself, freed to be properly creaturely' (p. 125). Figural imagination, then, goes hand in hand with a thoroughly secular sensibility. We see some of this logic at work in Barth's reading of Job. The relation between Job and God is understood and analysed as a figure of the relation between Christ and God. And Job's act of witness to eschatological reality, his being as a type of Christ, is grounded solely in God's plan — in his decision to be present to him in an act of veiling. To what extent does this free Job to be Job? Having asked after the subject of Job's complaint, Barth patiently follows its contours, tracing its ups and downs until he reaches its heart — Job's simultaneous knowledge and ignorance that it is God with whom he has to do in this alien form — which he then probes and investigates. This is, on one level, attentiveness of a high order. Barth is not content simply to summarize the content of Job's speeches. He wishes to bring out their twists and turns in order to place Job before us in his nature as 'more than life-size' (p. 401). As a result, he is able to do considerable justice to Job's arguing and the fact that this is not merely tolerated but actually commended by God (Job 42.7—8). The 'dilemma' in which he finds Job, as simultaneously right and wrong, has the capacity to make sense of various of the book's puzzling elements, and in particular of the apparent contradiction between God's rebuke of Job in 38.2 ('Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?') and his commendation of him in 42.7 ('Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath'). Seeing Job's complaint through the lens of this dilemma is part of what allows him to be so attentive to its multifacetedness. Barth has clearly captured in it something of the significance of the book. This is not the end of the matter, however. In his complaint, Job is caught up in an act of witness beyond the historical sphere to the eschatological reality in which he is God's obedient servant. This is the ultimate dynamic of his movements within the poem, in which there is conferred upon him the status of being simultaneously right and wrong, the structure according to which his entire history is understood, and which constitutes his obedience as opposed to the friends' disobedience. Within this structure, however, there is no consideration of any development Job might undergo in this course of his history. As we have seen, because the resolution of the dialogue awaits the eschatological act of God in the Whirlwind speeches, the dialogue remains in and of itself a 'blind alley', a human stalemate. This effectively removes all teleology and transformative dynamic from history. In other words, Barth may have shown a certain attentiveness to the contours of Job's complaint, but he does not begin to plumb its psychological, social and historical depths: Job as a human being only comes partially into view; as 'more than life-size' he nevertheless remains one-dimensional in his act of witness beyond the complexities of the historical sphere to the main actor within and above this sphere, the one whose decision constitutes Job's obedience — God.

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Conceptually, the reason for this is clear. God's act of veiling, his presence to Job in Job's complaint, can effect a transformation ^/history, giving rise to a distinction within it between Job's obedience and the friends' disobedience, but it cannot lend history an immanent dynamic or teleology. 'Job — simul iustus et peccator — is right in all his sayings as the servant of Yahweh, and in none of them as fallible man' (p. 406). The fallible human being within history remains, in and of herself, condemnable. Only in her eschatological status as the servant of God is she to be affirmed. History, in other words, is only affirmed to the extent that it points beyond itself, being caught up in an act of witness to eschatological reality. In this act it gains no immanent integrity. Job's obedience can only be a status conferred on him from without. A diagnosis of this problematic one-dimensionality might also be offered from an exegetical perspective. Barth reads Job according to a schema involving a primary opposition between right and wrong (applied to the distinction between Job and the friends) in which, secondarily, each term also contains a minor form of its opposite, i.e. the one in the right is also in the wrong, and vice-versa. This ultimately prevents Barth from considering Job in his particularity, because he is limited to his status as one pole of a binary opposition. It is this binary structure of Barth's exegesis that Eugene Rogers criticizes, but from a slightly different angle.21 He identifies it is a feature of Barth's typological exegesis, which involves his reading the Bible exclusively in terms of the binary of election and rejection (on the pattern of Christ, who is the elect and rejected human being in one). His diagnosis is that Barth is in the thrall of an abstraction from the Spirit parallel to the abstraction from Christ that Barth had himself identified in the older Reformers' doctrine of predestination. His own doctrine of election counters the latter but in so doing makes an analogous mistake in relation to the Spirit. Rogers says of Barth's Christocentric exegesis: 'its subtlety is dialectical, not plotted; twofold, not circumstantial. It does not tell us how to talk about the means by which God works among others — third parties, circumstances^ communities — to hold the twinned pairs for display' (p. 56). It is the Spirit, according to Rogers, that resists such binary reduction, reminding us that '[election] always takes place concretely in a community and environment' (p. 76). To take the Spirit 21. E.F. Rogers, 'Supplementing Barth on Jews and Gender', MT 14.1 (1998), pp. 43-81. 22. See CD II.2, pp. 354—409, 458-506, in which Barth offers an extended series of readings primarily of biblical narratives, finding in them pairs of elect and rejected. It is to these narratives, among others, that David Ford turns his attention in Barth and God's Story: biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the 'Church Dogmatics' (eds. R. Friedli et al.\ Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity., vol. 27; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1981), concluding, in consonance with Rogers, that Barth has a 'picture of Jesus which plays down the reality of other people in a way which the stories themselves do not support' (p. 93). He describes this further as a 'monism of the Gospel story' (p. 13), suggesting that the attempt to relate everything to this one story not only puts great strain on the story itself but fails to do justice to the complexity of reality (cf. also 'Barth's Interpretation of the Bible', in Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth, pp. 55-87 (esp. 82-87)).

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seriously would allow a supplementation of Earth's typological exegesis with a form of anagogical exegesis, communities being understood as types or anagogues of the community of God in the world to come. This is a brilliant 'internal critique' of Barth's theological exegesis. But does it go far enough? Or does it leave the basic structure of this theological exegesis intact? Must we, in other words, go beyond internal critique? ' To be sure, anagogy would certainly foster a theologically informed attentiveness to more of the particularities of the text. But at least in the case of job, an appeal to anagogy would not seem to address the real problem. In Job, at least within the poem, there is a noticeable lack of third parties and wider circumstances.^ The focus is almost exclusively on Job (and the shadow of his friends). What Barth needs is a deeper understanding of this one character. Anagogy might extend Barth's theological vision, but it cannot deepen it in this way. In this respect, at least, it leaves the determinative structures of Barth's interpretation intact: anagogy, like typology, is a pattern in which history points beyond itself; attentiveness to the action of the Spirit may alert one to further particularities within history that are caught up in the act of witness to that which is beyond history, but this action remains operative within the grammar of witness and so cannot lend history a truly immanent dynamic and integrity. The Spirit may allow for a more particularized description of God's act of veiling and the historical constellations this gives rise to, but it does not undermine the basic dynamic of veiling/unveiling, nor overcome the fundamental gulf between historical and eschatological reality. This yawns as wide as ever. Bringing the conceptual and the exegetical together, we might sum up the problem we have found at the heart of Barth's interpretation as follows. Barth's reading, in a word, is monotheological. Construing Job's history according to the grammar of witness, the only dimension of Job's life he is able to explore fully is his relation to God — his witness to Christ the true Witness. Just as the gulf between eschatological and historical reality relativizes all distinctions within history, so does the theological, for Barth, relativize all other forms of discourse. At its worst, this implies a 23. My response to this question here can be no more than suggestive. I have not begun to do justice to Rogers's critique of Barth, which offers a richer and more radical repair of his theology than 1 have been able to portray here. For this, see his Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), esp. pp. 140-91. In particular, 1 have not addressed the question of the extent to which Rogers's suggestion that election is also by the Spirit as well as the Son and the Father (see pp. 166—69) in fact undermines and breaks out of the static structure of Barth's doctrine of election with its implicit duality of history and eschatology, allowing justice to be done to the historical processes of election. This is a much more difficult question. The repair of Barth's theology envisaged in what follows by way of a rereading of the book of job follows a different line of development than that offered by Rogers, but it may nevertheless be compatible with his suggestions. 24. This is not to forget the silent presence of Job's wife, in relation to whom Rogers's approach might be most fruitful.

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fundamentally non-dialogical understanding of theology, giving rise to a form of exegesis in which theological-conceptuality can only replace the text. For it is in the nature of such non-dialogical theological concepts that they cannot be interrupted by the particularities of the text. And for this reason, they gain unrivalled monopoly over it — blind to the dimensions of it that are not so amenable to neat conceptualization. This is the danger implicit in Earth's theology if carried to its logical extreme. I do not suggest that Barth falls wholly prey to it in his interpretation of Job; only that the tendency can be perceived in his inability to explore the historical, social, psychological — indeed human — dimensions of the text. 7 Retrospect and Prospect Notwithstanding its limitations, however, Earth's schema has yielded real insight into the book of Job. Moreover, Earth's interpretation as a whole is extraordinarily lucid, elegant and compelling. This is clear, for a start, from the way in which it avoids the problems faced by a theodicy approach (as outlined in the introduction to this book). The first of these concerned the banality, or worse, absurdity of the prologue as that which, on the one hand, does no more than set up the problem of the poem, and on the other hand, provides the answer to the poem's question about the reason for suffering in advance. For Earth's interpretation, however, the prologue — as that which portrays Job's eschatological obedience, the pure form of his relation to God — is fundamental. It is the hidden and revealed truth of the poem, without which the poem would remain unintelligible and obscure. The second problem concerned the return to Job's initial state in the epilogue and the fact that this can only serve to undermine the radical insight of the poem, which severs the connection between righteousness and prosperity. Barth avoids this problem altogether because Job's material blessing in the epilogue is again understood eschatologically. Quite apart from this, however, Earth's primary concern is not the correctness or not of the doctrine of retribution, but the form that Job's obedience must take when God is present to him in an 'alien form'. In this connection, the epilogue, as the point at which Job creappear[s] in the pure form which for the moment is concealed' (p. 398), is a sign that in the intervening period of the poem Job does in fact stay the same. The third problem, lastly, concerned the expectation laid upon the Whirlwind speeches as that which provide the long-awaited answer to the problem of evil. For Barth, they are at once infinitely less burdened with significance and infinitely more. On the one hand, they provide no new information in relation to what has come before; they add no content to the portrayals of Job's relation to God in the prose narrative and the dialogue. On the other hand, they are absolutely fundamental, as the point at which God establishes the identity of the pure and alien forms of his relation to Job; of the prose narrative and the poem. As such, they are not only the impetus of

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Job's complaint, but the hinge on which the book turns. This, indeed, is the genius of Earth's interpretation — the way in which he makes sense of the disjunctions within the Joban text. The Whirlwind speeches, as that which prove the prose narrative to be the secret of the poem, establishing Job to be the same throughout, are that which hold the book together, connecting prose frame to poem. However, as we have seen, this genius is also that which renders Job onedimensional, subsuming him in an act of witness in which he is reduced to the dialectic of his right and wrong. And on a larger scale, Earth's inability to recognize the developmental nature of the poem goes hand in hand with his inability either to do justice to the historical and material contours of the prose narrative, or to capture the richness of the panorama of creation in the Whirlwind speeches. Different possibilities might be opened up, I suggest, if the Whirlwind speeches were no longer understood as the divine, eschatological resolution of the human stalemate of the dialogue of which there is no immanent way out, but instead as themselves the goal and endpoint of the dialogue — a wisdom reached through it. This would be to recognize them as the source of a fundamentally human as well as divine wisdom. Not only would this give the dialogue its own immanent dynamic and teleology; but it would open up a different set of possibilities in relation to the prose narrative. In what follows, I will explore the possibility of a historical understanding of the prose narrative, in an attempt to do justice to its materiality and embodiment. More specifically, I will consider the epilogue and prologue in developmental terms, and the poem as that which effects this historical transformation — as its internal impetus. If the prose narrative embodies a Wisdom tradition, the poem could be regarded as an act of prophecy within this, not remaining an isolated act of rebellion but being reintegrated into this greater historical movement. By way of his theological conceptualities, Earth was unable to explore these 'wisdom' dimensions of the book of Job. In the next few chapters, therefore, these theological conceptualities will be put to the test in their re-exposure to the text of Job.

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2 Obedience as Self-Examination Barth on the Story of the Rich Man However, before returning to the text of Job itself in an exploration of it that will disrupt and go beyond the theological conceptualities of Earth's interpretation, I turn in this chapter to another biblical commentary in the Church Dogmatics-, a commentary on the story of the rich man in Mark 10.17— 31 and parallels. Barth works within the same theological structures here, but out of them there emerges a dimension that was not present in his commentary on Job, something which Barth picks up on in the section following his commentary on the rich man under the heading of 'selfexamination'. I take this sideways step because of the potential fruitfulness of this concept as a new way into the book of Job: in particular, as a category within which to explore Job's psychological and social development. An unfolding of the concept of self-examination in relation to Job will open it up in directions not envisaged by Barth, focusing further the challenge that a reexploration of the book of Job will in any event raise for Barth's theology. 1 The Grace of God as Command Barth's commentary on the story of the rich man falls within the ethical section of his doctrine of God, 'The Command of God', in which Barth moves from talking about God's gracious election of humanity in Christ to the ordering of the life of humanity that occurs in and with this gracious election. For the human being who is reached by it, the Gospel has the form of the Law, and grace the form of a command. In this context too, the gulf, present in Barth's commentary on Job, between our being in Christ and the being we still find ourselves in, between eschatological and historical reality, emerges. Barth analyses God's command under the headings of the 'claim', 'decision' and 'judgment' of God. As the form of God's grace — the manner in which God's grace meets us — God's command has its basis in what is already reality. It is not simply an ideal or objective, but the truth of our existence. This is its claim on us, that it presents us with who we really are before God. But in this sense it is also a statement about us, a decision God has made about us 'from all eternity and at the heart of time in the person of Jesus Christ' (pp. 632f). Because we fall short of this reality, however, the 1. CD LI.2, pp. 613-30.

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command as claim on us and decision about us can only be to our judgment as those who do not measure up to its reality. More specifically, it is the judgment of our old being in the event of its making us new. When this command confronts us, then, there is no room for a surveillance of it, a weighing up as to whether we should obey it or not, as if we were free to decide in relation to it alongside other possible courses of action. This would not be to be claimed by it, but rather to have mastery over it, and obedience to it as such could only be qualified obedience. In contrast to this, God's command 'addresses us absolutely from within ... [making] it impossible for us to withdraw in face of it to a place to which we can withdraw in face of all other commands — to ourselves' (p. 595). In other words, it deposes us as judges, opposing to this representation of ourselves — in which we are actually against ourselves — our true selves, the reality of grace. In this there is a radical reversal. It is no longer primarily we who ask after God's command, but God in his command who asks after us, presenting us with who we really are and asking whether we measure up to this. It is in this way that it claims us, decides in relation to us and judges us: 'it moves and changes, marks and qualifies [us]', determining our being; our decision in relation to it is the realization of its decision in relation to us (pp. 631 f). As in the commentary on Job, the principal distinction is between our being in Christ and our being in ourselves, between true reality and distorted reality, leading to an understanding of sin, not as a failure in relation to the law which is subsequently overcome or made good by grace, but as a failure in relation to grace itself. In the context of the book of Job, this was understood in terms of falsehood as the untruth which opposes the truth of Jesus Christ. In the exposition of God's command, too, sin is the falling short of the already established reality of grace. It was this understanding that led, in the commentary on Job, to the dynamic of veiling/unveiling. As antagonistic to grace by its very nature, old creation could never give wray to grace in any of its parts, becoming new creation; new creation could only be veiled within it. The distinctive element of Earth's commentary on the rich man and its wider context, however, is its focusing of this dynamic of veiling/unveiling in the concept of command. In Barth's interpretation of Job, God was present to Job as Yahweh in the form of Elohim-Shaddai — true reality was present to and within distorted reality. But this presence, while being a highly disturbing and painful presence, was never understood as a critical, interrogating or commanding presence, requiring something from Job in response. Job's obedience was simply the manifestation of this presence. There was lacking a sense of encounter. This is what the dynamic of command brings with it: a confrontation between unreality and reality; between my being in myself and my true being in Christ. The Whirlwind speeches, as the identification of Yahweh and Elohim-Shaddai, of true reality and its alien form, established Yahweh's presence to Job in this alien form, but they did not bring about a

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confrontation between Job and Yahweh (or more specifically, between the historical Job and Job as the servant of Yahweh). This was above all due to their being understood as an eschatological act which, to be sure, changed history, but did not enter into it as a moment of confrontation, calling Job to account. To interpret them instead as command would be, as we will see, to understand them in just this way — as an eschatological act with a historical spearhead. This is how the command appears in Earth's interpretation of the story of the rich man, giving rise to a new way of phenomenally distinguishing between obedience and disobedience.

2 The Commentary in its Context The more specific context of this commentary is Earth's analysis of the 'Form of the Divine Claim' (§37.3). Earth distinguishes between the command of God, as that in which permission and obligation (Gospel and Law) are one, and all other commands, which tend towards either legalism or lawlessness. This unity, however, is not something which can be attained in an ethical principle, but something which is present as reality in the person of Christ. It is the shape of Christ's obedience as the one for whom '[t]he will of God is His own will. To do it is the meat by which He lives' (p. 605). It is done, therefore, in complete freedom. In this is described the pure, asymmetrical relation between the free God and the free human being. This reality is what meets us in God's command, opposing to the free will in which we constantly come back to ourselves as judges between good and evil the genuine freedom in which we belong to God. With the other commands that press in on us we can 'make agreements' and 'come to a peaceful understanding', ultimately being able 'freely and gladly [to] gratify [their] wishes' (pp. 594-5). The command of God, on the other hand, demands not only this or that act of obedience, but ourselves. As permission, then, it is also genuine obligation. 'It demands my active acknowledgement "that I am not my own, but the property of my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ'" (p. 610). In this way, the command of God sets us before our true reality in Christ and the gulf between this and ourselves. Earth's distinction between the form of God's command and the form of all other commands is therefore another way of making the distinction between eschatological and historical reality. For this reason, however, although the command of God is to be distinguished from all other claims on us, it must 'always [wear] the garment of another claim of this kind' (p. 584). For if it is to speak to us, it must be veiled. Only as such can it give rise to moments of confrontation within history which, in and with their specific claims on us, place us before the question of our existence in Christ, asking after our relation to this person. We see concretely how this takes place in Earth's commentary on the story of the rich man, which serves as a further explication of the ultimately Christological form of the divine command, and in so doing — more

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significantly for our purposes — explores the dynamics of the veiling/ unveiling of this command within history.

3 The Veiling of the Command In a way reminiscent of his commentary on Job, Earth's interpretation gains its momentum from a distinction between the obedience of the disciples and the disobedience of the rich man, which is assumed throughout. However, because of the ever-present gulf between eschatological reality, which alone embodies true obedience, and historical reality, characterized by disobedience, this assumption of a distinction within historical reality is forever being undermined and having to be constructed on a different footing. This gulf is the hidden and revealed background of the conversation between Jesus and the rich man in Mark 10.17—22, in which the rich man is determined as disobedient by his encounter with God's command: 'At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful' (v. 22). It is in Jesus' sentence in v. 21 ('Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor — so you will have a treasure in heaven — and come, follow me.') that this command is brought concretely to expression, pronouncing the judgment which up to that point in the conversation had been concealed. In this sentence and the response it invokes it becomes clear that the rich man has not been obedient as he thought he had to the commandments cited by Jesus in v. 19, or at least he has not obeyed them as God's command. Instead, he has only recognized their external form, allowing them 'to determine his action but not himself (p. 617). Thinking that 'he has a position from which he can judge and acquit and justify himself (p. 617) in relation to God's command, he has not submitted to the radical claim it has on him, and his obedience to it is only a qualified obedience — and therefore disobedience. 'Jesus looked upon him and loved him' (v. 21 a). He looks at him as one whom he reckons as his own, willing him for himself (p. 618). It is as such that Jesus utters the threefold sentence that follows, which is aimed at the rich man's being as one who belongs to Jesus. What Jesus offers him in this sentence, most clearly in its third form — to come and follow him — is 'participation in His own freedom' (p. 622). This offer and opportunity, however, can only be realized in a pronouncement of judgment on the rich man as one who is 'not free for the freedom commanded and proffered' and lacks 'the being which [is] the presupposition of this becoming' (p. 622); he lacks in himself precisely that which is there for him in Jesus. He is thus incapable of taking up this offer. Instead there opens up at his feet 'the abyss of the absolute impossibility of the relationship between God and the man . . . who as sinner sets himself in opposition to God' (p. 623). In Jesus' sentence, in other words, the rich man is confronted by God's eschatological command as the demand for nothing less than himself. However, this does not occur 'in an abstract and academic way. [Jesus' words are] aimed concretely at his specific existence and condition. We see it [what

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is demanded] as that which he personally lacks' (pp. 618—19). God's command, in other words, is veiled in this concrete form appropriate to the historical reality in which the rich man exists. Tor he had great possessions' (v. 22b). Jesus' command aims at him where he is 'captive and bound by regard for other lords and powers besides God ... Demanding that he should sell what he has, Jesus wills that he should be bound to God and therefore freed from all other lords. He is not this. He is a captive of his "great possessions'" (pp. 619—20). Just as Job and his friends were wedded to a doctrine of retribution and could only conceive of God on this model, the rich man cannot conceive of the eternal life he asks after in v. 17 in dissociation from his great wealth. He is locked into a system of existence in which mammon necessarily has value placed on it. Therefore, when Jesus presumes to equate eternal life with poverty, the two 'opposites' in the rich man's system, the rich man is incapable of grasping it and can only turn away in dismay. 'What was required was incommensurably too much, too great for him. He could not sell what he had - he could not free himself from the lordship and commands of mammon ... He was not the man for this' (p. 622). In his command, Jesus collapses the rich man's system and thereby points to the possibility of something beyond it. Beyond the rich man's acts of obedience or disobedience within this system — in conformation to the external form of the command — is his true being. He is confronted by it to the extent that he comes up in Jesus' command against an impossibility — an anomaly in relation to his existence. His going away sorrowful witnesses to the gulf between his historical and eschatological being that forms the true background to this impossibility, for it embodies the disobedience in which he necessarily falls short of this eschatological being. In this confrontation with the command of God, the rich man, being unmasked as disobedient, is condemned and excluded from eternal life. The command of God kills. It only does so, however, because it is also a Word of promise. The rich man is judged and condemned on the basis of what is already his new being in Christ. This new being remains available for him even as he exists in his old being. For the abyss that yawns before him here between the old and the new, between God and the sinner who is in opposition to God — is precisely that which is embraced by Christ, who has established his kingdom 'in the depths of this abyss' (p. 623). c[A]s the rich man he is, he must really die and pass'; in dying as a rich man and becoming poor, however, he will begin to 'tread the way of life' (p. 620). The command has an inherent dynamic, killing the old being in favour of the new, having the new as its ultimate goal.

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4 The Successive Relativization of the distinction between Obedience and Disobedience This is what is to be discovered in the second half of the story in the exchange between Jesus and the disciples — but only after a series of reversals. Barth begins by distinguishing the disciples from the rich man as those who have done what the rich man was incapable of doing: left all and followed Jesus (as Peter claims in v. 28). As Jesus looks on them' (w. 23, 27) he is looking at his own. However, Barth goes on to ask whether the disciples have really left behind the 'hill of difficulty' on which the rich man had been broken. The rich man 'was not the man to conquer or remove it. Were they then, the disciples, the men to do it?' (p. 624). Their astonishment at Jesus' words and their resulting question, 'Who then can be saved?' (v. 26b), suggest that they are not. It would seem that they also stand 'on the edge of the abyss' that had opened up at the rich man's feet (p. 624). '[I]n relation to the command of God, they are in exactly the same position as this man' (p. 625). Rather, as becomes apparent in v. 27, the real distinction — and this is the 'hinge' of the story — is between that which is impossible with humans and that which is nevertheless possible with God. In the light of this distinction the merely human distinction is relativized and collapsed. What the rich man lacked — the fulness of Jesus — is that which, from the point of view of their own ability, the disciples lack, too. Amidst the debris of this collapse, Barth attempts to reconstruct the distinction: And what distinguishes the disciples of Jesus from the rich man, and gives them the advantage over him, what differentiates the obedient from the disobedient, is the fact that they may be witnesses to the divine possibility' (p. 625), making use of and putting into effect that which they do not possess but which is nevertheless available for them in Jesus. In this way the impossible becomes possible to them. But even before it has been firmly established, Barth begins to undermine and remake this distinction. He continues To them? No, it was never possible to them. It was still possible only to God. But in the knowledge that what is possible only to God has become possible for them, ... in faith — they became obedient' (p. 626). They live, in other words, in the shelter of his ability. They do this, on the one hand, quite concretely by leaving all and following him. On the other hand, it never becomes their ability They are covered simply by what is there for them in Jesus, and what is there for them in Jesus is also there for the rich man. 'If they stand with him under the judgment which is passed upon all that is possible with men, he on his side is united with them under the promise of that which is possible with God' (p. 626). The only distinction, then, is that the disciples can and must attest this possibility of the grace of God, thereby becoming apostles. As the saying in v. 31 suggests ('Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first'), this distinction is not absolute, being subject, rather, to the possibility of reversal (both the disciples and the rich man exist within the

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sphere of the kingdom of Christ); but a tentative distinction nevertheless remains. However, even this crumbles and is done away with as the commentary progresses. The crunch point is the 'jarring concern' expressed by Peter in response to the harsh sentence pronounced on the rich man: 'We have left all and followed thee' (v. 28), the meaning of which is brought out by Matthew in the additional question 'What becomes of us?' (Matt. 19.27). This anxious 'backward look' calls in question the assumption that they, unlike the rich man, have really left everything behind to follow Jesus in the radical way required of them. Rather, they start to question and regret this decision, weighing it up alongside other possibilities. The fate of the rich man has made them realize the precariousness of their position. From their amazed response to Jesus' words in v. 23 ('How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God'), it appears that they too have been operating within a system like that of the rich man. As it collapses for him, it also collapses for them. They realize that they do not have the being Jesus aims at beyond this system any more than the rich man did, and that far from having achieved something by their actions, they are entirely reliant on Jesus. This causes them, however, to cling all the more to that which they have done in contrast to the rich man, hoping that it will after all secure them a place in eternity. In this step, all phenomenal distinction between the disciples and the rich man apparently disintegrates. The 'faith' that was attributed to the disciples turns out to be entirely nominal, corresponding to no reality of their own. It is in response to the disciples' concern, however, that Jesus utters the promise of w. 29—30: 'there is no one that has left house or brothers or sisters ... for my sake and for the gospel ... who shall not receive again a hundredfold ...' Lurking in this is clearly the critical question of whether the disciples are those of whom it speaks. Between the word of Peter in v. 28 and the answer of Jesus in v. 29f. there is a supremely indirect relationship. A great gulf obviously opens up between the being which the disciples (within the limits of what is possible and impossible with men) have represented as theirs, and that other being, based on what is possible in God's free compassion, which is ascribed to them by Jesus as their new and proper life; the being which He sees in them and does not cease to see in spite of their representation of themselves, (p. 629)

Insofar as they fall short of this other being, the promise is a Word of judgment to them. However, by addressing the disciples in this promise on the basis of their new existence, Jesus himself, in a kind of creatio ex nihilo, steps over the abyss for and with them, 'making them, from what they are by themselves, into what they are permitted to be by and with Him' (p. 629). As an attack on the old being, the promise is also a creation of the new. Moreover, its general form ('No one') suggests that the promise is not only addressed to the disciples, but is something valid and real for the rich man too; that Jesus steps over the abyss for him too. The promise would seem to

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be the other side of the command in v. 21, expressing overtly what the command expressed covertly, and vice versa: both witness to the eschatological command-promise as that which kills the old in order to bring about the new.

5 Obedience as the Disruptive Transformation of the Self All the various phenomenal distinctions between obedience and disobedience made within the course of Earth's commentary are relativized and drawn up into this one movement, set in motion by the command, from death to life. This movement is attested, first of all, in the prima facie direction of the story, which begins in the command's revelation of the human impossibility, hence in judgment on the rich man, and continues and has its climax in the lifegiving promise of Jesus to the disciples, making them alive. It emerges on another level when the story is reinterpreted, according to a more complex understanding of the command-promise, as an attestation of the eschatological command that both kills and makes alive, valid for both the rich man and the disciples. The question this overwhelming momentum of the command raises is whether any room at all is left for a phenomenal distinction between obedience and disobedience. If it does, this is certainly not made explicit in Earth's commentary, which leaves us with no more than a succession of constructions and deconstructions of the distinction. Perhaps, however, it is this succession itself which is important. Could it be that the eschatological movement from death to life brought about by the command becomes manifest in this movement of successive relativization? Is it here that we are to look for the contours of a phenomenal obedience? We have followed this successive relativization as a textual movement within Earth's commentary. However, when we return to the disciples' particular trajectory within the story, we will find that the direction of the story — in its attestation of the movement of the command — can be reconstituted on a third level (corresponding to the movement of relativization). On this level, the first disjunctive movement, in which the rich man was condemned and the disciples' made alive, is reconstituted as a single movement in relation to the disciples, and the second eschatological movement is reconstituted as a temporal transformation. Key in this is something that has not been commented upon up to this point: that Jesus' promise comforts the disciples; that by it, Jesus 'assuages and dissipates their concern' (p. 629). This is the endpoint of a transformation undergone by the disciples. Their world has been thoroughly shaken by Jesus' sentence of judgment on the rich man. In it an abyss has opened up at their feet too and they are naturally disconcerted: 'Who then can be saved?' (v. 26). As the ones who have given up everything, they are in need of assurance (v. 28). It is to them in this state of bewilderment that the promise speaks. While it contains in a veiled way both a judgment of their old being and their eschatological

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recreation as Jesus steps over the abyss, it also has the thoroughly mundane or phenomenal effect of comforting them. In this transformation the disciples' obedience is deconstructed and reconstructed on a different footing. Their lives are radically disrupted. It is not so much the end result of this which is important — in promising them a hundredfold of what they have lost, both in this world and the world to come, Jesus in effect reinstates the system of value to which they and the rich man adhere — but the fact of the disruptive transformation. The rich man is also confronted by Jesus' radical Word of judgment, but he does not let his world be disrupted by it. Instead, he simply goes away. The disciples, by contrast, are radically brought in question: not just their acts but themselves. The secure place from which they observe and judge the world is threatened, disturbed and uprooted. And they do not shield themselves from this disruption, but cling in it to Jesus, who takes them to the far side of the abyss where they regain the security they had momentarily lost. They do not, then, remain in this state of disruption; but they are transformed by it. The nature of this transformation is captured in the notion of repentance. The grace of Christ 'makes them [the disciples] responsible, guilty, inexcusable and ... ready to confess their guilt and repent. This is the demand — that they should turn and draw back, regretting their regret' (p. 630). They do so to the extent that they are open to the command, allowing themselves to be disrupted by it. This openness, as opposed to the defensiveness of the rich man in which he closes himself off from the command, is what constitutes their phenomenal obedience. It is made possible by the veiling of the command, which brings about the temporal confrontation that causes the disruption in the disciples' identity — their repentance, however provisional this might be. In the book of Job the only repentance was Job's repentance in the aftermath of the Whirlwind speeches, but this, in keeping with the eschatological nature of God's speech, could properly only be understood eschatologically. There was no room for the provisional and penultimate kind of repentance that has started to emerge in the story of the rich man. One important remaining question, to which I will return later, is whether there is anything that lies behind and beneath the movement of disruption undergone by the disciples. Do they have a deeper identity in which this movement is rooted? In their clinging to Jesus, are they clinging to something in themselves which is deeper than the identity in which they are uprooted? Or does this disrupted identity exhaust their phenomenal existence? Beyond this disrupted identity is, of course, their eschatological being in Jesus. The question, then, is whether this also has a phenomenal dimension which is probed and plumbed in the movement of disruption. Or is it simply veiled in this movement, and thereby attested in it?

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6 The Divine Command as Divine Decision Implicit in Barth's analysis of the story of the rich man is the nature of the divine command as divine decision, from which the rich man derived as disobedient. His decision to walk away was the realization of the decision about him made and expressed in Jesus' command, which in presenting him with what was there for him in Jesus unmasked and judged the being he had in and of himself. As such, however, and as became apparent in the second half of the story in relation to the disciples, it was also a promise by which his old being was killed in favour of his new being. The command of God is this 'primal decision made and expressed in the will of God from eternity and the act of God at the heart of time, and continually made and expressed again at every moment of our life in time' (p. 633). It is on this aspect of the command that Barth concentrates in the next section, 'The Command as the Decision of God' (§38), in which he considers God's command in its relation to our lives as they consist 'in a continuous series of decisions which we have to make and execute' (p. 634). In the first subsection of this, 'The Sovereignty of the Divine Decision' (on which I will focus), he develops a more generalized account of the movement of obedience that we discovered in his commentary on the story of the rich man. The phenomenal movement of repentance found there corresponds in this section to a concept of 'selfexamination in preparation for the divine command'. To find in this an unequivocally phenomenal dimension of obedience, however, is to go beyond Barth, who even here tends towards talking about the eschatological subject of faith. It is in reading him to some extent against the grain, therefore, that resources may be discovered for the opening up of a whole new set of possibilities in relation to his interpretation of Job — possibilities which go beyond the limits of Barth's own concept of self-examination. In the story of the rich man we had to do with one moment of decision in the life of the rich man (and of the disciples). The veiling of the divine command was examined at this one point. The divine command as decision, however, as that which is made from eternity, is the decision from which all of our decisions derive, making us accountable in every moment of our lives. Corresponding to the situation of confrontation with the divine command in which the rich man found himself is, in relation to our lives as a whole, a situation of continuous accountability to and responsibility before the divine decision, in the critical presence of which all our decisions are made, and by which they are judged. The question then arises: if repentance was the nature of the obedience that corresponded to confrontation with the divine command, what is the nature of obedience that corresponds to a life of accountability? How might the concept of repentance be extended and generalized?

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7 Self-Examination In an analysis of the word-group ('to test, examine, prove') in the New Testament, Barth makes a threefold distinction between '(1) the sovereignty of the divine testing, judging and deciding over human being, willing and doing; (2) . . . our own decisions which are subject to this sovereign divine decision of God; and (3) the necessity of making [them] always in preparation for our approaching encounter with this supreme divine decision' (p. 636). The sovereign divine decision puts our decisions, as these make up the continuity of our lives, to the test. And the result is our determination and condemnation as disobedient. As we saw in the case of the rich man and the disciples, there was no distinction between the two parties from the point of view of their decisions (the rich man's decision to go away and the disciples' decision to follow Jesus, which was also revealed in its hollowness). It is therefore only in the third aspect that room is potentially made for a generalized account of phenomenal obedience. I will take time, first, to draw out further the notion of preparation involved in this third aspect. Corresponding to (1) God's testing and scrutinizing gaze which translates the Old Testament bachan), which results positively in (2) the approved human being (SoKlpOC) and negatively in the reprobate is (3) the human being's own 'testing of his actions in the presence of God and in the light of God's own examination of them' (pp. 638—39). This testing consists in a continual asking of the twofold question of how it stands between God's command and our conduct, our conduct and God's command. But this is in fact to ask 'how it stands between Jesus Christ and us, whether we are such as may live in the strength of His life, death and resurrection, of His Word and the power of His Spirit, whether we are "in the faith"' (p. 641). And this, in turn, is precisely to be asking about the relation between our being in ourselves and our being in Christ. It is, in other words, a testing of ourselves in relation to our true reality i.e. a self-testing or self-examination, as Barth calls it (p. 635). It therefore mirrors exactly the testing we are subjected to in God's command, which places us before our true reality, demanding not just our particular acts and decisions but ourselves. By it, then, we are tested to the core, 'pierced to the depths by the searching glance of God' (p. 634). Our self-examination corresponds to this divine examination of ourselves. This preparatory testing or self-examination, in which we glance back over that which we have willed and done and forward to the path that we will pursue in the future, scrutinizing the nature of our present choice in its 'integral connexion with past and future choices' (p. 634), is our appropriate attitude to the divine decision we await in every moment, i.e. to our situation of accountability. As that which is carried out, not in any moment between one decision and the next, but in and with each decision, it is not an additional element which is further subject to the divine decision, but throws a different perspective on the series of decisions that fall under God's

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decision. This shift in perspective was what allowed the distinction to be made between the rich man's defensiveness towards the divine command and the disciples' repentance, without undermining their fundamental equality before God's command. Similarly here, rather than focusing on the nature of the decisions themselves, the concept of preparatory testing brings out the movement that occurs within them. Barth goes on to describe this preparatory testing in terms of the indefatigable asking of the question 'What ought we to do?' This is not, however, about securing any presumed knowledge of the divine command. As we saw in the story of the rich man, the command was only revealed insofar as it placed the rich man and the disciples in question, judging the being they had in and of themselves as disobedient. They were not able to envisage what Jesus was demanding because it broke out of their very frames of reference. The command, in other words, demands, uproots and reconstitutes the very self that asks after it: 'it establishes its own validity by asking concerning my own: whether and how far I can satisfy it and be justified and stand before it' (p. 651). Uprooting the questioner, it also uproots the question, which can therefore never hope to secure an answer. Its rationale lies, then, not in the answer sought, but rather in the attitude developed in the asking. 'Our previous answers cannot consist of more than hypothesis and opinion. They cannot be a knowledge of the will and command of God. We are not in any sense already in harmony with God's sovereign decision' (p. 646). It is necessary, then, that we approach the divine command with the readiness of having all our categories for thinking and acting radically undermined and constituted on a new footing. Preparation for the divine command is this readiness and complete openness for the 'radical attack' that we submit ourselves to when we truly ask the question 'What ought we to do?' By contrast '[t]he continuity of a life which steadily affirms itself from one decision to another, developing from within itself, can only be the continuity of disobedience' (p. 647). It should be clear by now in what way this preparatory testing, as openness to the divine command, implicitly picks up on and develops the concept of repentance gleaned from the story of the rich man, as this described the disciples' openness to disruption and transformation by the divine command. As Barth says, to ask seriously 'What ought we to do?' necessarily means 'even in relation to our best works and the most sacred of our hypotheses and convictions [to] confess that we are sincerely sorry and repent' (p. 646). 8 The Problem of Phenomenal Obedience Up to this point Barth's concept of self-examination is open to interpretation as an account of phenomenal obedience. In the course of our self-examination, our categories for thinking may be radically undermined and constituted on a new footing; our very selves may be disrupted; but they are never reconstituted in the eschatological newness which their disruption neverthe-

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less attests. They never, in other words, come to derive fully from the divine command, being brought into harmony with it. Although our hypotheses and convictions may be transformed, they never become equal to the divine command. The obedience described in such self-examination would seem to be unambiguously phenomenal. But as we read further in Earth's exposition of the asking of the question 'What ought we to do?', Earth increasingly uses language that could only be applied to the eschatological subject of faith. He begins by claiming that if we knew what we were asked with the question 'What ought we to do?', our action would mean our justification before God; the will of God would be our will. It is because this is not the case that moral reflection, the continual asking of this question, is necessary. However, he continues by saying that 'in the very fact that we ask we will receive knowledge of God's command; in the very fact that we desire this knowledge, what we are and will and do and do not do will be directed by the command of God and obedient to it and sanctified by it' (pp. 648—49). This would suggest, contrary to the presupposition on which the question was asked, that harmony is created between our will and God's. That in this 'knowledge' of the divine command he is indeed talking about an eschatological obedience is confirmed when he continues: 'those who know it [the divine command] do not know it of themselves. Of ourselves we may well know what we want to do, but not what we ought to do. When we ask what we ought to do, ... we have already understood our decisions to be subordinated to the sovereign decision of God. We have already recognized ourselves to be those who are known by God. We have confidently committed ourselves into His Hand' (p. 653). On the one hand, then, knowledge of the divine command is something we receive when we ask aright; on the other hand, such knowledge cannot be had of ourselves; it can only be had, in other words, eschatologically. It is only the eschatological subject of faith, therefore, who can truly ask the question 'What ought we to do?' Although Earth potentially makes room for an account of phenomenal obedience, he appears unable to carry it through. He falls back, rather, into the dichotomy between our being in and of ourselves apart from Christ and our being in Christ, between the old and the new. He can find no middle path as it were. The reason for this, I suggest, is that the disruptive movement of self-examination is not rooted in anything deeper than the hypotheses and convictions that are disrupted. We asked in relation to the disruptive movement undergone by the disciples whether there were further depths to this — depths of identity to which they clung. This was to ask whether their eschatological being in Jesus also had a phenomenal dimension in which their disruptive transformation was rooted. The way in which Earth develops the concept of self-examination suggests that it did not. For the dichotomy between the eschatological and phenomenal reasserts itself here in a way that leaves no room for a level of existence which is at once eschatological and phenomenal. This was also the case in Earth's commentary on Job: Job's true

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reality as the servant of God was only given witness to in his historical existence; it was a status conferred on him from without; it was veiled in his historical existence rather than constituting its depths. This clear separation between the eschatological and phenomenal would account for Earth's inability to hold onto a phenomenal understanding of obedience in the form of self-examination. Because the being to which this self-examination points is purely eschatological, the movement of disruption can only witness to it by pointing beyond itself. It has no deeper connection to it and thus consists in an arbitrary chain of disruptions, never getting anywhere nearer to the eschatological reality that lies beyond its reach. It is no wonder, then, that in order to get beyond this arbitrariness, Barth slips into talking again about the eschatological subject of obedience that lies behind the asking of the question 'What ought we to do?' 9 Self-Examination as a Hermeneutical Key to the Book of Job By bringing the concept of self-examination into engagement with the book of Job, I intend in the following chapters to explore and fill it out in ways that Barth was unable to do. On the face of it, this concept would seem to be thoroughly appropriate to the book of Job, and moreover, to supply a way of talking about and developing the dimensions of the book that were not done justice in Barth's interpretation. This demonstrated the centrality of the question of Job's obedience for the book, but constantly shifted the emphasis from the human dimension of this obedience to its basis in the action and speech of God. It thus failed to explore Job's own temporal and historical self in its immanent development and growth. The concept of self-examination, on the other hand, could be well equipped to do this, particularly in the light of the fact that Job, in his complaint, is constantly preoccupied with the matter of his self-vindication, and therefore with a testing of the true nature of his integrity. Furthermore, an examination of God's command has led us to an understanding of God's presence as his searching, testing and interrogating presence. Could this be the manner in which God, in the power of his speeches out of the whirlwind, is present to Job?

Part II Does Job Fear God for Naught? A Rereading of Job

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'Does Job fear God for naught ( )?' This is the question that the Satan asks God in Job 1.9, and in this question, as I will contend, is expressed the central concern of the book of Job. This is already suggested by the weight that falls on it by virtue of its position in the narrative. As the moment which triggers the reversal of Job's fortunes, it is the pivotal point in this opening plot. From this first moment of questioning, of doubt inserted into an otherwise apparently spotless picture, there is no turning back either for God or for Job. The movement that here begins is relentless under its own momentum. Once God has allowed this doubt to feature, it simply cannot be eradicated, or the slate wiped clean. For it inserts a big question mark into this idyllic scene — that of the possible hollowness of Job's righteousness. We will see later more clearly why this question mark is a real and not just spurious 'obstacle' in this opening scene, pointing to depths of Job's integrity that cannot be represented within the terms of its 'naive' portrayal, and in the absence of which its surface integrity begins to crumble. It functions, therefore, somewhat like a theological irruption into what might otherwise be read flatly (i.e. with little awareness of this deeper plane of meaning), and ultimately brings to the fore what might be seen as the deepest theological assumption of the book, one which will gain the closest of scrutinies in what follows: that God is one who is to be feared for naught. In understanding this to be the key question of the book, I am following Barth in shifting the emphasis from what is so often seen as the burden of the book of Job — the problem of evil, or unjust suffering — to the problem of sanctification, or in Barth's terms, the problem of obedience. I intend to do so, however, in a rather different way from Barth. Although my interpretation will not completely break with the Barthian frame of reference, it will draw extensively on two other frames of reference — the psycho-philosophical and the intras crip rural — in such a way as to interrupt, indeed disrupt, Barth's theological conceptuality I do not intend thereby to set up a balanced, impartial dialogue between competing frames of reference; the theological context will, if implicitly, remain ultimate. Thus, rather than resulting in a hybrid context of interpretation, the encounter of the theological with other discourses and methods is one which, by way of detour, interruption, critique, and radical disruption, will ultimately lead deeper into the theological. This might also be taken as a wider point about the enterprise of interpreting the Hebrew Bible Christologically, of which Barth's commentary on Job is obviously an example. My interpretation will continue, implicitly, to work within a Christian frame of reference. Although I at no point explore the issue of supersessionism explicitly, I work on the assumption that to avoid the latter by no means necessarily entails the shedding of one's Christian identity as interpreter. Called for, rather, is the continual interruption and deepening of this identity in its encounter with that which is other than it; in 1. Chinnam, lit. 'out of favour', so 'gratuitously, for nothing' or 'without cause' (BOB, p. 336). The connotation of gratuitousness will emerge in the course of what follows.

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hermeneutical terms, a continual wrestling with the Hebrew Bible as that which cannot be assimilated or exhausted by its Christian interpretation, but forever bears the signs of Christianity's other, Judaism.~ The way in which my interpretation departs from Barth's is captured most effectively by the distinctive way in which it handles the 'disjunctions' within the book of Job: between the prose narrative and the poem on the one hand, and (within the poem) between the dialogue and the Whirlwind speeches on the other. In relation to the first, I intend, with Barth, to place a renewed emphasis on the prose parts of the book, often regarded as merely a frame for the poem the supposedly more substantial part of the book — or even as a distortion of it. I will depart from Barth, however, in the way in which I construe this emphasis. For Barth, the prose frame is central to the meaning of the book as that which portrays the 'pure relation' between God and Job with a clarity and immediacy it will not have in the poem. And crucially, this purity, as the transparency and truth in which Job exists for God, is to be conceived of eschatologically. Only in the shift to the poem is this eternal and eschatological relation plunged into the murky vicissitudes of history. The prose narrative is, then, the hidden and revealed truth of the poem. In sharp contrast to Barth, I understand the prose narrative as fully fleshed history/ and moreover, as the quintessential place in the book where this is so. As a consequence it is possible to understand it as dynamic and teleological in its own right. In this way, to anticipate, the epilogue may itself be regarded as a critical transformation of the piety of the prologue — a matter to be addressed in Chapter 3. This, in turn, has consequences for the relation between prose narrative and poem. Rather than as a plunge into historical reality (as it was for Barth), I construe the shift into the poem as a stripping away of the fence that was around Job (as reported by the Satan in 1.10), a removing of the flesh from this 'idyllic' history — not in a move of abstraction from history but in one of dissection. That is, in pursuit of the question of whether Job fears God for naught, the poem examines his history — and thus his obedience — in its internal structure. To this end, both an act of magnification and one of cutting away takes place: Job must be revealed in his bare bones. More precisely, the prologue has set up a certain kind of piety, which although affirmed, and by no less than God, has already also been brought explicitly into question even in this opening narrative by the question of the Satan. By means of its dissective scrutiny the poem carries out a rigorous critique of this piety — a critique which does not serve ultimately to undermine the piety of the prologue, but rather to root it in something deeper. By means of this 2. These are insights that are currently being explored in the practice and theory of Scriptural Reasoning, in which Jews, Christians and Muslims come together in shared study of their scriptures. See the website for the Society for Scriptural Reasoning (http://www.depts.drew.edu/ssr/nationalssr/). 3. I.e. fully embodied and temporal as opposed to eschatological. 4. Again as opposed to eschatological reality.

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critique the book undertakes an analysis of the concept of obedience (in Earth's terms), and more fundamentally, an investigation of the possibility of obedience: does Job fear God for naught? More concretely, the book acts as a critique of the very first verse: 'that man was perfect ( , tarn) and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil' (l.lb); and in particular, of the word , which might better be translated as 'having integrity'. In this word is summed up the piety of the prologue; or better, the prologue is one way in which this word can be fleshed out. As Albert Cook aptly shows,5 the rest of the book might then be seen as improvisations on this word, carrying out by means of these its critical probing. In Cook's terms, a 'provable' kind of piety must be interrogated and transcended. Thus the concept of integrity undergoes a transformation and reworking. This reworking and critique as we find it in the poem will be the subject of Chapter 4, section I.' In relation to the prose narrative as a whole, this reworking might be seen as that which effects the transformation from prologue to epilogue — as its internal impetus. It is in this respect that the concept of self-examination — as a description of Job's inward reflective journey — will prove so appropriate. This understanding of the first disjunction, moreover, results in turn in a very different construal of the second — that between the dialogue and the Whirlwind speeches. Insofar as the poem is regarded as the inner dynamic of the historical prose narrative, the Whirlwind speeches can no longer be understood, with Barth, as a purely eschatological resolution of the stalemate of the dialogue, with the result that all transformative dynamic is removed from history. I will explore, instead, an understanding of the Whirlwind speeches as themselves part of the development of the dialogue, indeed as the culmination of Job's internal searching. This will form the subject of Chapter 4, section II.

5. Albert Cook, The Root of the Thing: A Study of job and the Song of Songs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 13-19. 6. See Chapter 6 for a more detailed analysis of the root CDP (tamam, from which tarn is derived) and its trajectory within the book of Job.

3 The Prose Narrative Transforming Piety In this chapter I will undertake a dynamic interpretation of the prose narrative, dynamic both in its trans for matory account of the relation between prologue and epilogue, and in its hermeneutic, which moves between prologue and epilogue in a successive uncovering of new layers of meaning. I start with an examination of the world of the prologue, discovering already here ways in which it points beyond itself to depths of Job's piety that cannot be captured within its basic parameters, thereby inviting both substantiation and critique. I then turn to the epilogue as that which provides this substantiation and critique, reading the multiple differences that emerge in its relation to the prologue as signs of a transformation. The epilogue brings to light depths of Job's relation to God that were not discernible in the prologue. The nature of its critique is not to suggest that the prologue-piety is inadequate on its own terms, calling for its displacement by a superior piety, but simply that it is limited in perspective, showing only a slice of Job's relation to God. This critique, however, sheds new retrospective light on the prologue. First, negatively: the prologue-piety, insofar as it is not rooted in anything deeper, begins to show signs of weakness, cracks appearing in its idyllic facade. Second, positively: deeper dimensions can be discerned within the prologue itself — a reminder that critique of the prologue-piety must never be severed from an even more fundamental affirmation of it.

1 The Prologue as Promise and Invitation The prologue moves within a world of blessing and cursing. Job is quintessentialry one whom God has blessed: 'You have blessed ^ ) the work of his hands and his possessions have increased in the land' (l.lOb), says the Satan to God. The Satan then goes on to predict Job's response to his affliction as one of cursing: 'But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee (~ ^ to thy face' (1.11 cf. 2.5). Job, however, continues to bless God: 'the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed ( ) be the name of the Lord' (1.21b). It is in the first five verses that this world of blessing and cursing and its operative piety are set forth most concretely and concentratedly. These describe the lifestyle of Job 1. Literally, 'bless', but used here as a euphemism for cursing, as in 1 Kgs 21.10, 13; Ps. 10.3.

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and his family, their continual feasting and Job's continual sacrificing on behalf of his children, for 'it may be that [they] have sinned, and cursed ix ) God in their hearts' (v. 5b). Job's 'blessing' ( barak) of God is thus embodied in acts of righteousness, corresponding to his having been blessed by God: with prosperity (w. 2—3) and a festive abundant lifestyle (v. 4). That Job can be said to be 'the greatest of all the people of the east' (v. 3) is most likely a reflection both on his piety (v. 1) and on his prosperity7 (w. 2—3). Framing the description in w. 1—5, lastly, are two expressions which might be taken together as a summative. statement of Job's piety. In v. 1 Job is described as 'one who fears God ( )'; and the end of v. 5 i states: 'thus did Job continually I )', echoing the typical Deuteronomic description of covenant faithfulness, e.g. Deut. 14.23: '... so that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always/continually ( >' — a theme to which I will return. ' Up to this point the connection between Job's piety and prosperity has been left entirely unspecified. We are simply given a holistic picture in which as little attempt is made to separate them as to draw a more specific connection. Looking more closely, what we find is a chiasmic structure around the summative statement in v. 3 claiming Job to be the greatest of all the people of the east: Job's piety in v. 1 is given narrative content in v. 5, as is the catalogue of his wealth (w. 2—3) in v. 4. This strengthens the assumption that Job's greatness is indeed predicated inseparably of his piety and prosperity, suggesting that Job lives in a world in which they form one undivided whole. It is only the Satan who, not content simply to leave it in place, critically probes this holistic picture by asking, 'Does Job fear God for naught? Have you not put a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands and his possessions have increased in the land.' (1.9—10). As the question which lies behind the wager between God and the Satan in the prologue, and that which the poem — apparently not satisfied with the outcome of the prologue — puts further to the test, this may be regarded as the question posed by the book itself. It asks, to paraphrase, whether it is possible to separate Job's piety and prosperity; whether Job would continue to worship God if his wealth were removed. What is the concern that lies behind this question, and in what context might it have become a concern? The opening idyllic scene gives us little clue. It will be helpful, therefore, to break down the Satan's questions into the various ways in which they might be made sense of. First, most flatly, it suggests that of course it is easy for Job to serve God when he is well-off. But would praise and worship of God come so naturally to his lips in times of hardship? On this rendering — which is perfectly possible within the limits of the prologue — Job's test might be understood, crudely, in parallel terms to 2. 'This summative statement refers to Job's renowned wisdom, wealth, piety, and integrity' (HABEL, p. 87).

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that undergone by Abraham in the Akedah^ where God commands him to sacrifice Isaac (Gen. 22). Both are tested for their obedience under the most extreme of circumstances. However, the comparison should also alert us to the differences. By asking him to commit this dreadful act, God tests Abraham for his absolute loyalty: will he obey God whatever God commands? In the case of Job, by contrast, it is the nature and motivation of his piety which is under scrutiny: is his piety, after all, bound up with his prosperity, and will it start to crumble when this is removed? Whereas Abraham is tested for whether he 'fears God' (Gen. 22.12), Job is tested for whether he 'fears God for naughf. The connection between piety and prosperity seems to be at stake in a more complex way than the above rendition of the Satan's question allows. Indeed, the question so construed could easily be asked the other way round: Is it hardship which causes people to call on God, whereas riches inevitably corrupt and make complacent? This fact should point to the possibility of a deeper reading of the Satan's question. Second, the Satan's question might be rendered, as it is by most commentators/ 'Does Job fear God for naught or only for a reward?' Does he serve God, in other words, only because of the riches he knows he will receive in reward? Such a question might well have arisen in Wisdom contexts in which there was prevalent a belief in world-order according to which piety corresponds to prosperity and wickedness to desolation, i.e. an incipient doctrine of retribution. By undermining this world-order, the prologue of Job puts to the test the hypothesis that piety is only a matter of self-interest. Oddly, however, when we compare Job to the Wisdom texts from the Ancient Near East with which it has affinities, we do not find this question to be of wider concern. The precise connection between piety and prosperity is certainly at stake, but either in terms of an exploration of why God allows the righteous to suffer, i.e. theodicy (e.g. Babylonian Theodicy4), or in a consideration of how one is to comport oneself in relation to God when afflicted for no reason — when world-order appears to have broken down (e.g. Babylonian Job; Sumerian Job6). These are issues which have more in common with the poem of Job. The testing of Job's piety that we find in the prologue would seem to have no strict parallel. But is this because we have been considering it in isolation from the poem? The Ancient Near Eastern

3. E.g. J.L. Crenshaw, 'Job', in Urgent Advice and probing Questions: Collected Writings on Old Testament Wisdom (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1995), pp. 433f; R. Gordis, The Book of God and Man: A Study of Job (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 152; R.W.L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 85; HABi-L, p. 90. 4. Transcribed and translated in WG. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Uterature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 63-91. 5. Transcribed and translated in Lambert, Wisdom, pp. 21—62. 6. Trans. S.N. Kramer, in J.B. Pritchard ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (3rd ecln; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 589-91.

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parallels to Job, in pointing us to the poem, also point to the possibility of a deeper reading of the satan's question. Indeed, with either of the above renderings, the concern expressed in the Satan's question is put to rest within the limits of the prologue: Job passes the test; no more need be said. He is capable of worshipping God in hardship; or alternatively, he does not need the hope of reward to incite him to piety. Therefore, the fact that the book does not end with the prologue but continues in the poem ultimately gives the lie to these renderings. Not only the presence of the poem, but also its content, as we will discover, brings out greater depths to the Satan's question than have so far been registered. It opens up a can of worms, showing that these shallow readings have misrepresented the problem and thereby dispensed with it all too easily. By reading the prologue in the light of the poem I am choosing to read the book of Job at the stage of redaction in which it has reached us. This is not to assume anything about its textual history. Indeed, the alternative would be to get involved in the complex reconstruction of this history so as to identify earlier stages of provisional integrity, which could then be taken as the basis for interpretation. For we do not know that the prologue in the form we have it (or the prologue and epilogue together) ever existed in isolation from the poem. It would thus be historically naive to read it as such without further investigation. Neither of these methods (holistic reading or historical reconstruction) is hermeneutically unencumbered. When the latter predominates, the meaning of the text is implicitly held to be exhausted by its history, new authorial intentions being added at each stage of redaction. The text's meaning is no greater than the sum of these intentions. The former, in considering the text at a particular stage of its redaction, assumes that out of a complex of more or less conflicting authorial intentions a whole emerges that is more than the sum of its parts. The merits of this approach will be borne out by its fruits. In the poem the question of whether Job will bless or curse God in response to his affliction (cf. 1.11) is considerably complexified. This simple choice is no longer what is at stake. There is no question of Job's letting go of God; the question is Just how he is to hold onto him. His problem is not with his lack of wealth or health, but with God and God's justice. He is confronted by a God who confounds the well-known terms of their relation — one who has ceased to bless him for his piety, arbitrarily cursing him as if he were to be punished. Job had come to know God as one who blesses the righteous and curses the wicked. This was the one to whom he had clung in his acts of piety, 7. This reading perhaps fails to do justice to the internal dynamic of the prologue, in which the test is repeated, with intensification, in 2.1—10. In reading the prologue in the light of the poem, I am choosing, rather than to explore this dynamic further, to develop another line of interpretation. I do not suggest that it is the only possible one — only that it is one fruitful way of interpreting the book as a whole. These differing avenues of interpretation may even be an indication that the prologue and poem did not always belong together as a unified whole.

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acts which were therefore inseparable from the blessing that followed. He now experiences God as one who arbitrarily wields this 'law' of their relation, imputing the pious Job with wickedness and thereby turning righteousness and wickedness on their heads. What does integrity mean in relation to this God who arbitrarily perverts justice? How can Job cling to this arbitrary God? To whom will he cling? As filled out in the poem, therefore, the doctrine of retribution — according to which God blesses the pious and curses the wicked — is the framework or structure within which Job relates to God.8 The Satan's question, in this context, asks whether Job can carry on serving God once this framework has been undermined and God revealed to be the arbitrary power beyond and behind it. This might be rephrased in the Barthian terms with which we are already familiar. God appears to Job in an alien form in which he is unrecognizable to Job. But how can Job worship an unrecognizable God? Can Job carry on serving God once his categories for conceiving of God have been undermined? In sum, is it possible for Job to serve God not on the basis of any preconception of who God is? However, although this captures something of what is at issue, we will discover as we proceed in a closer examination of the poem that this conceptual rendering of the Satan's question is ultimately inadequate. Indeed, as has already been suggested, at stake is not so much an unrecognizable God who confounds Job's preconceptions, but an arbitrary God who overturns justice. A fuller understanding of the Satan's question, therefore, will unfold in what follows. What I have said here is only by way of anticipation. It should at least have become clear, however, that the Satan's question renders the prologue's notion of integrity severely problematic. What, then, is entailed when it is stated later in the prologue that in response to his affliction Job 'still persists in his integrity ( , tummah)\ as God says in 2.3 and Job's wife in 2.9? The natural context of Job's integrity or piety was the doctrine of retribution. The one to whom Job clung in his acts of piety was the God from whom he received blessing in response. How, then, can he continue in this piety once its conditions of meaning have been taken away? That Job 'persists in his integrity' does not therefore get to the heart of the matter. For it is the nature of this integrity that is now in question, the way in which Job can continue to serve God even after his framework of relating to God has been 8. The relation of the doctrine of retribution found in Job to the sapiential understanding of world-order will be discussed below.

9. According to this rendition, by undermining the basic framework within which Job relates to God, the test to which Job is subjected brings into question the whole conceptual apparatus by means of which Job relates to God. As we see from the poem, Job never actually leaves this apparatus behind. More precisely, then, the question is not whether Job can let go of all presuppositions, but whether the disruption of his principal presupposition brings to light another dimension of his relation to God in which he can be said to serve God 'for naught' or without preconception. 10. See pp. 168-70.

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disrupted — after this mammoth discontinuity. We no longer know what this would mean. Hence the matter cannot end with the prologue: the poem is a necessary sequel, exploring the question of how Job can continue to relate to God once the terms of this relation have been fundamentally called in question. This reading of the prologue in the light of the poem invites us to understand the opening scene of the prologue in terms of the doctrine of retribution: as a nexus of reciprocal actions on the parts of Job and God. It is this nexus that the Satan probes in his question, 'Does Job fear God for naught?' This gets us some way towards answering the question of the nature and context of the concern expressed in this question. However, it is possible to be even more specific. We have already seen that an incipient doctrine of retribution was at work in the early Wisdom tradition in the form of a belief in an immanent world-order according to which acts have built-in 11 consequences. However, as will be discovered later when we come to examine it (above all in chapters 5 and 6), what we have in the poem of Job is much more developed than this, involving a specifically legal interpretation of 12 the relation between act and consequence and of God's role in it. The complaint Job gives voice to in the dialogue with his friends involves a legal attack on God's justice. With this attack the poem of Job departs from other comparable Wisdom texts, doing so by means of its use of the legal metaphor.13 More specifically, what Job undertakes is a trial or (rib) against God. The pervasiveness of legal language in the poem of Job is widely recognized in the literature, and has led to an exploration of formal parallels with the various legal procedures of the Ancient Near East, as well as with the use of the legal metaphor elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Rather than consider such parallels of form in the strict sense, I intend to examine the shape of Job's with God against the background of Israel's relation to God through her prophets (see chapters 5 and 6). This naturally brings to mind the lawsuit speeches or found in Israel's prophetic literature, in which God summons and accuses his chosen people for their failure to keep the covenant. ^ However, I do not want to limit my investigation to these speeches as forms which might or might not have been drawn upon in the

11. Cf. K. Koch, 'Is There a Doctrine of Rebribution in the Old Testament?', in Crenshaw (ed), Theodicy in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 57-87. 12. Cf. F. Horst, 'Vergeltung: Im Alten Testament', RGG vol. 6, cc. 1343-46. 13. Cf. Zuckerman, Job the Silent, pp. 104-17. 14. See H. Richter, Studien %u Hiob (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1959); B. Gesmer, 'The Rib- or Controversy-Pattern in Hebrew Mentality', VTSup 3, 1960, pp. 120-137; M.B. Dick, 'The Legal Metaphor in Job 31', CBQ 41 (1979), pp. 37-50; and HABEL, esp. pp. 54_57 and 529-30. 15. The most famous of these is perhaps Mic. 6.Iff. See also e.g. Amos 4.1—3; Hos. 4.1—3; Isa. 3.13-17;Jer. 2.4-13.

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composing of Job. Rather, I will consider as a background to Job the broader shape of the relation between Israel and God to which these speeches contribute. Alternatively, I will treat God's with Israel as a more embracing metaphor: as a in which the prophet not only accuses and sentences the people on behalf of God, but argues with God on behalf of the people. ) In this respect, Job's foremost and pre-eminent precedent, as one who argues against God, is the prophet — known for his unequalled boldness in relation to God, as one who in the face of God's anger persistently intercedes for his wayward people.17 To understand Job against the background of Israel's prophetic literature is not to deny that the book of Job emerges in a distinctive context with its own concerns that go beyond those of the prophets, but to claim that these concerns are best understood in 18 their indebtedness to the prophets. Importantly in this regard, the shape of Israel's relation to God in the prophetic literature, at least as contextual^ ed in the canon, is covenantal: whatever its more precise historical origins, the prophetic 3^*1 only makes sense against the background of Israel's covenantal legal traditions (preserved for us most extensively in the writings and redaction of the Deuteronomic School), to which the prophet makes appeal in his accusation; and it is God's obligation towards his covenant to which the prophet appeals in his pleadings with God for the people. More specifically, the various lawsuit speeches throughout the prophetic literature have been given (at least in their canonical form) a predominantly Deuteronomic shape: the judgments ordained by the prophets are portrayed as the fulfilment of the 16. Most limit it to the one side. E.g. Gesmer, 'The Rib-Pattern', pp. 128—33; Zuckerman, Job the Silent, pp. 110-11; W. Brueggemann, Tradition for Crisis: A Study in Hosea (Virginia: John Ivnox Press, 1968), pp. 86—90: '[The prophet] may be understood as the spokesman for Yahweh, as the lawyer for the plaintiff, as the bearer of the covenant word to a people which tended to forget or deny the covenant' (p. 89). Brueggemann docs not complement this with a reference to God's 'forgetfulness' of the covenant. In contrast to this, see Y. Muffs, 'Who will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession', Chapter 1 of Ijove and Joy: l^an>, l^angiiage and Religion in Ancient Israel (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), pp. 9—48. 17. See Chapter 5 for this portrait of the prophet (esp. pp. 120-23). 18. See Chapters 5 and 6 for the exposition and development of this thesis. And cf. Crenshaw, 'Popular Questioning of the Justice of God in Ancient Israel', in Urgent Advice, pp. 175—90, who argues that while Job has clear affinities with the wisdom controversy dialogue, the mood of Job is more akin to that of the prophetic controversy dialogue, in which selfvindication is also at stake. He concludes that Job is to be understood as 'rooted in wisdom and prophetic theology' (p. 184). Cf. also Zuckerman, who recognizes the affinities between Job's and those found in Israel's prophetic texts, but does not conclude that the author of the poem of Job was necessarily writing in conscious appropriation of those traditions, not being 'at all certain that the Poem of Job was written in the same Israelite/Jewish cultural milieu as other biblical texts containing juridical terminology' (Job the Silent, nn. 299, 354). Dick, in 'Job 31', notes an affinity between the theological implications of Job's and the prophetic (p. 49). 19. Cf. Brueggemann, Tradition'for Crisis; pp. 56—62. 20. See Muffs', Love, pp. 9-48.

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Deuteronomic curse, which Israel has brought upon itself by its disobedience to torah.21 As contextualized in the canon, in other words, Israel's relation to God through her prophets operates within the framework of the Deuteronomic Covenant and the legal 'doctrine of retribution' that undergirds it. By Deuteronomic Covenant I mean very broadly that covenant (which has gained its definitive form in the Deuteronomic literature) in which God's election of Israel is given human shape in torah, being mediated to Israel by means of this human structure, which assures well-being for those who live in conformity with it. Righteousness and wickedness gain their definition from this structure, as conformity and non-conformity to it respectively, being inseparable from the blessings and curses that ensue. If it is against this covenantal background that Job has emerged, then it is likely that the doctrine of retribution at work in Job has been informed and shaped by specifically Deuteronomic developments of the doctrine of retribution, and must be understood against this background. This would, at least, explain its legal casting, which attests something more developed than the incipient doctrine of retribution found in early Wisdom literature, even if the doctrine found in Job also has roots in the latter. This is not to argue for a literary dependence of Job on Deuteronomy or other Deuteronomic literature. However, affinities between Deuteronomic thought and the Wisdom tradition have been widely recognized, some arguing for a wholesale influence of sapiential thought on the Deuteronomists.2 Indeed, it has been argued that Deuteronomy has taken its doctrine of retribution from the Wisdom tradition and nationalized it.24 Whichever way round the influence, it seems plausible that there was a convergence of thought at various points where the Deuteronomic School and the Wisdom tradition came into contact with one another. If so, it is likely that there were borrowings going in both directions, Wisdom thought taking on a new shape in the process. My contention is that the book of Job was given its decisive shape at this interface, with roots going back into the Wisdom tradition, but equally configured in accordance with Deuteronomic thought. A dependence of the book of Job on Deuteronomic thought is recognized by H.H. Rowley, who holds the book to be reacting against the Deuteronomic doctrine of retribution as this had been individualized in contemporary circles, leading to the hard doctrine that is put in the mouths of

21. Cf. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), pp. 633-46. 22. Whether or not 'torah' was a fixed concept in the time of the Deuteronomists. Important is the fact that Israel's relation to God has a human shape given definition in various laws. 23. Cf. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 244—319; and D.F. Morgan, Wisdom in the Old Testament Traditions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 94-106. 24. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy^ pp. 307—19 (although this is not a mainstream view).

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Job's friends. ~ Walter Brueggemann, while not making any historical claims about the relation between Job and torah, echoes this view in his characterization of the doctrine of the friends as the epitome of a legalistic distortion of torah in which 'linkages between deed and consequence became frozen into absolutist principle'. ' In contrast to such a view, however, I contend that at stake in the book of Job is not simply a particular application of the Deuteronomic Covenant or distortion of it — which one could challenge without bearing upon the Covenant — but the Deuteronomic Covenant itself. It is with this that Job is wrestling. Whether it be understood individually or collectively is for Job neither here nor there; at stake is the arbitrariness of a God who no longer acts according to the terms of the relation he has instituted with his people — according to his covenantal law. In his complaint, therefore, Job raises a question at the heart of the Deuteronomic Covenant itself. Contra Gordis,27 however, this does not amount to a simple rejection of the Covenant and its doctrine of retribution. As we will see, Job's wrestling, in all its vehemence, continues to be a wrestling with the Covenant — which Job never lets go or leaves behind. Looking back at the prologue in this light, Deuteronomic resonances can be discovered already here. Of particular note are the parallels between the depiction of Job's affliction from God and the Deuteronomic curse as catalogued in Deuteronomy 28 — one of the great comminations to Israel in which the Lawgiver sets forth the blessings and curses of the Covenant that correspond to Israel's obedience and disobedience respectively. Compare the successive destruction of Job's livestock, sons and daughters (1.14—19) to the curse described in Deut. 28.31, 32: 'Your ox shall be slain before your eyes, and you shall not eat of it; your ass shall be violently taken away from before your face, and shall not be restored to you; your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and there shall be no one to help you. Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people ...' And the description of Job's last affliction: 'the satan went forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crowrf (2.7), echoes Deut. 28.35 verbatim. These resonances are open to various construals. The collocation in Job 2.7 and Deut. 28.35, for instance, may simply depict in both cases the thoroughness of God's affliction, without suggesting a shared conceptuality. If there is a literary link, moreover, the influence could go in either direction. On their own, then, the parallels cannot support the claim that the prologue

25. ROWLEY, p. 18. Cf. Gordis, God and Man, pp. 135-51. HABEL denies this link, claiming that 'the basic tenets of this doctrine are so widespread in the wisdom literature of Israel and the ancient Near East' that no such specific derivation of thought need be postulated (p. 41). And this is despite his recognition of the legal interpretation this doctrine gains in Job. 26. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament^ p. 686 (cf. pp. 596—97). 27. God and Man, pp. 152-53.

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is operating within a Deuteronomic frame of reference. In the light of the poem and its Deuteronomic frame of reference, however, it nevertheless makes sense to read them in this way. This would be to understand God's affliction of Job not as any affliction, but specifically as an application of the 28 Deuteronomic curse — with the further implication, moreover, that it actually constitutes a breach of the Deuteronomic Covenant: a cursing of Job when blessing was due. Job's and God's actions no longer correspond as they should do according to the reciprocal rule of the Covenant. Again in this light, the blessing and the cursing of the prologue may be understood more specifically as the blessing and cursing of the Deuteronomic Covenant. There is, indeed, a close verbal parallel between Job 1.10, 'You have blessed the work of his hands )', and Deut. 28.12, 'The Lord ... blessing; all the work of your hands ' ' 90 ( )'. Of course, language of blessing and cursing is not restricted to the Deuteronomic Covenant, and its presence in the Joban prologue need not be uniquely suggestive of the latter. Nevertheless, when the prologue is read in the light of the poem, the connection is a natural and fruitful one, allowing the closer identification of the nexus of reciprocal actions depicted in the prologue's opening scene with the Deuteronomic doctrine of retribution. If it is according to this that Job's integrity or (tummaB) is defined, the description of Job as one who 'fears God ... continually' (w. 1, 5) may then indeed be understood as a portrayal of Job as one who keeps the Deuteronomic Covenant. This is not to claim that Job is portrayed in the prologue as an Israelite contemporary of the Deuteronomic writers and redactors. It is possible that the author or redactor of the book of Job who gave it its Deuteronomic shape chose to set her story in the ancient past — in what seem from the other characteristics of the prose narrative to be patriarchal times — or perhaps to take a well-known legend and retell it from her own Deuteronomic perspective. If so, she has felt free to construe her

28. In this case, it misses the point to try to identify the specific disease it describes (as do e.g. POPE, DRIVER-GRAY), the point being its (symbolic) nature as a Covenant curse. That the collocation of 2.7 does not need to be understood literally is suggested by its usage in Isa. 1.5-9, which makes it plausible that it was known at the time as a symbolic depiction of the affliction of the nation of Israel. 29. Cf. CLINES, who comments that the divine blessing on Job is 'such as is promised in Deuteronomic paraenesis to those obedient to Yahweh', referring to Deut. 14.29; 16.15; 24.19; 2.7 and 15.10 (p. 26). 30. Job's wealth consists in animals and servants; Job, as the head of the family, offers sacrifices without the intervention of a priest; he lives for 140 years (42.16); the monetary unit ( ) is ancient (42.11); and there is no reference to Israel's distinctive historical traditions. Cf. CLINES, 'the narrator is clearly depicting an archaic age and not writing of his own time', (p. Ivii); HABEL, 'the characters of the story are located in a distant patriarchal world more than a thousand years before the time of the author, a world uncluttered by the later traditions of Israel' (p. 39); and Crenshaw, Urgent Advice^ p. 427.

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protagonist to a certain degree in Deuteronomic terms/ imposing her own categories on this ancient figure in order to pursue her own agenda: indeed, by characterizing Job as one who keeps the Deuteronomic Covenant, she creates a means by which she can explore this Covenant in its bare essentials. Even more minimally, we can imagine that the author or subsequent redactor of the poem decided to implement the folktale of Job because of its already existing affinity with her Deuteronomic concerns. In this case, the resonance of the prologue with Deuteronomic thought is a matter simply of its creative reinterpretation in the light of the poem. David Wolfers, in Deep Things out of Darkness, " is, as far as I know, alone in exploiting these parallels between the prologue to the book of Job and Deuteronomy, similarly concluding that Job's affliction is to be understood as an application of the Deuteronomic curse. However, claiming that the Deuteronomic curse was consistently understood as a harbinger of national disaster, he goes on to make a bold and controversial case for an interpretation of the prose narrative as a political allegory in which Job is to be equated with Judah at the time of the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah by successive Assyrian monarchs, Judah at the hand of Sennacherib in the time of Hezekiah/" Although I do not go all the way with Wolfers, I believe that the Deuteronomic parallels are worth taking into account, being open to quite a different interpretation from the one he goes on to offer. Indeed, they bring us back to our initial question of the nature and context of the concern expressed in the Satan's question — as a question posed by the book itself. The answer that presents itself on this reading of the prologue — in the light of the poem and the possible Deuteronomic allusions within the prologue itself — is as follows: the Satan's question is asked in the context of the Deuteronomic Covenant; its concern is with the nature of this Covenant and 31. According to R.W.L. Moberly in The Old Testament of the Old Testament: Patriarchal Narratives and Mosaic Yahwism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), something similar went on in the case of the patriarchal narratives: he argues that 'the use of the name YHWH in Genesis conveys the perspective of the storytellers who tell the originally non-Yahwistic patriarchal stories from within the context of Mosaic Yahwism' (p. 36). As such, they teel free to construe aspects of their material in Yahwistic terms, even while being aware that the name Yahweh was first disclosed to Moses. 32. Deep Things out of Darkness: The Book of Job: hssays and a New Translation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). 33. This would, among other things, explain the use of the phrase 'to bring back the captives of (TTOC? DTK?) in 42.10, which in all its other occurrences refers to a nation, and usually to its return from physical exile. Its occurrence here (apparently in reference to Job as an individual) thus presents the interpreter with a conundrum, which Wolfers believes to be satisfactorily solved only by allegorical interpretation (Deep Things^ pp. 103—04). It is commonly argued, however, that the noun in the phrase has the same root as the verb with which it is paired pi 82), rather than deriving from HD^, 'to take captive' (a sense which may nevertheless have been read into the expression quite early on). This yields the meaning 'to turn the turning', i.e. 'to change the fortunes of, which would fit the present context (e.g. DRIVER-GRAY, p. 349; GORD1S, p. 395).

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thus with the very way that God relates to his chosen people, having the purpose of probing just this. To recall, the Satan's question asked whether Job could carry on serving God once the doctrine of retribution - as the framework within which he relates to God - had been undermined, bringing Job's set of categories for conceiving of God into question. Now that we have identified this doctrine of retribution more specifically with that doctrine that forms the backbone of the Deuteronomic Covenant, we may rephrase the Satan's question once more. It asks, in sum, whether there is more to the Covenant than the level of reciprocal action captured in the doctrine of retribution: whether God is more than the one who blesses and curses; and whether the human partner is more than the one who clings onto God in his identity as this one, i.e. whether human integrity within the Covenant is ever more than the counterpart of God's blessing, which is its legal definition in this Covenant. In his question, 'Does Job fear God for naught?', therefore, the Satan asks whether Job is simply wedded to God as the one who blesses and curses, or whether he exists more fundamentally for the sake of a God who is beyond such definition — whether he serves God, not for the sake of his multiple attributes, but simply for God's sake. Corresponding to this is the question of whether Job has an integrity beyond all definition — an integrity simply as God's servant. It may not be possible to answer the Satan's question within the parameters of the prologue, in which what it would mean for Job to 'persist in his integrity' is only intimated — a fuller exploration being left to the poem. But its statement of this as a fact does act as a sort of promise. For it suggests that even after the breach of the Covenant as it exists on the level of reciprocal action, there is nevertheless something left for Job to persist in - a deeper dimension of the Covenant which is not jeopardized by this breach. It is in this persistence that Job must prove himself to be one who 'fears God for naught' — in transcendence of the preconceptions involved in his Covenant piety. Or rather, it is only on this deeper level that a 'for naught' relation becomes conceivable. Because these deeper undercurrents are left unexplored in the prologue — a surface integrity being retained in which Job apparently passes the test — the prologue remains only a promise. It acts, therefore, primarily as an invitation.^ both for substantiation and critique. 34. Again, this reading does not explore the internal dynamic of the prologue, in which a concept of integrity does emerge, culminating in 2.10, which Moberly glosses as a relationship with God 'for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness, and in health' (The Bible, p. 86). 35. HABP^L also effectively interprets the prologue as an invitation, both more generally in the 'foreshadowing' technique he perceives to be at work (pp. 83—84), and specifically in his interpretation of the 'closure statements' to the opening episodes (1.22, 2.1 Ob). 'They pronounce a verdict on Job's innocence . . . But these verdicts are also signals of a key question posed by the book as a whole. Is Job absolutely pure in all he says, or do his subsequent railings against God constitute a verbal sin of which he repents in the end (42.6)?' (p. 81). However, he resolves the dynamics of invitation in an exclusively narratival sense. Thus the seven-day period of silence at the end of the prologue is

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On the one hand, that Job persists in his integrity requires substantiation. On the other hand, such persistence (and the 'for naught' this involves), being unimaginable within the parameters of the prologue, can only break out of its limited perspective. In other words, the deeper dimension of the Covenant can only have a disruptive effect on its surface structure — however much the latter is ultimately affirmed as its bearer. Hence substantiation must be carried out by means of critique. 6 2 The Epilogue as Substantiation and Critique I suggest that this substantiation and critique are to be found (in the first place) in the epilogue. Usually regarded as a return to the idyllic beginnings of the prologue, the epilogue is rarely considered more than an appendage to the book, or as necessary only to achieve proper closure. Thus, in treating the interpreted as '[allowing] time tor bitterness and rage to build up within Job before they explode in the curses of Job's next speech . . . When the period ends a definite change has come over the hero' (comparable to David's transformation in 2 Sam. 12.15-23) (p. 98). Such an approach takes minimal account of the disjunctions within the book of Job, or rather smooths over these by means of the detection of narrative continuity. By contrast, it is a hallmark of my interpretation to regard these disjunctions as the binges of the book's meaning. In reconnecting the disparate parts through the question of the satan in 1.9, 1 have avoided any straightforward continuity and made room instead for a stratification of the book into discrete layers in which Job's piety is subjected to various manners of probing. The text's non-uniformity is thereby respected. Further, it is thus not only the poem that can be regarded as taking up the prologue's invitation, but the epilogue also. 36. As indicated above, the reading of the prologue I offer here, as that which undergoes critique in the rest of the book, is only one possible line of interpretation. Moberly, for instance, offers a much more unequivocally positive interpretation both in The Bible (pp. 84-88), and in 'Solomon and Job: Divine Wisdom in Human Life', in S. Barton (ed.), Where Shall Wisdom be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), pp. 3-17. In the latter, he relates the prologue to Job 28, the hymn to wisdom, ascribing each to the same narrative voice. The description of wisdom in 28.28 in the same terms that were used to describe Job in 1.1 allows him to understand Job's demonstration of integrity in the prologue as a 'paradigmatic display of wisdom' (p. 12). My treatment of the hymn to wisdom awaits Chapter 8. But to anticipate, 1 seek to read it both in the context of the prose narrative and in its more immediate context within the poem. The wisdom that Job displays, flagged up in 1.1, only gains substantiation in the course of the book as a whole. 37. E.g. HABKL, GORDIS, and J.L. Crenshaw, who states: 'The epilogue tidies up the story by degrees' (Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, rev. edn; Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1998, p. 94). ROWLEY, in a slightly different vein, believes it to be necessary simply to mark the end of the trial (p. 266). G. Gutierrez, in his otherwise deeply insightful book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (trans. M.J. O'Connell, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), makes almost no reference to the epilogue at all. When he states that the 'prose frame' is the key to interpretation of the book, what he means is the prologue as the setting up of a 'wager made with regard to talk about God' (p. 1). GOOD gives a lot more space to the epilogue in his commentary, but mainly in regard to its relation to the poem and the reversal that has been brought about in respect of this. This is perhaps the result of his reading of Job as a largely continuous narrative, without regard to the disjunctions or possible stratification within the text. In fact, if the epilogue calls out for comparison

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epilogue as a transformation and critique of the prologue, I am pursuing a novel and idiosyncratic line. On the one hand, the epilogue attests and fills out the persistence of Job in his integrity, present as promise already within the prologue. The very fact that the story can have such a continuation demonstrates this persistence to have been genuine rather than spurious, contentless and unsustainable. More 38 concretely, the extensive symmetry between the prologue and epilogue suggests that the world of the prologue is still intact and has not been disrupted beyond repair, but provides a structure within which this persistence can be conceived and narrated. If, then, the prologue-piety is to be criticized, this is not because it is to be replaced by something better, but in order to bring out aspects of the relation between God and Job that could not be displayed within its parameters. If this is to root it in something deeper, it is also to bring out depths which it already implicitly had. On a large scale, this symmetry between prologue and epilogue operates in terms of the chiastic structure they form together. First, the idyllic scene set up at the beginning of the prologue (1.1—5) maps onto the state at the end of the epilogue following Job's restoration (42.10—17). Second, the shift to the heavenly scene in the prologue and the implicit interaction between heaven and earth that ensues, effecting the transition from prosperity to desolation (twice repeated, 1.6—19, 2.1—8), corresponds to the direct interaction between heaven and earth in God's address to the friends in the epilogue, which brings about, or at least sets in motion, the transition to restoration (42.7—9). Finally, the desolation of Job at the end of the prologue and the friends' appearance (2.9—13) is paralleled by the direct involvement of the friends immediately preceding Job's restoration at the beginning of the epilogue (42.9). Further and more specifically, the epilogue attests the persistence of the Deuteronomic world within which Job's integrity is to be construed. It is, first of all, a world of blessing: 'And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning' (42.12); second, the connection between righteousness and prosperity is maintained, or rather re-established (w. 12—15); and third, the righteous act that epitomized Job's Covenant piety recurs in the sacrifice made by Job's friends (v. 8). If a 'for naught' relation cannot be conceived within the parameters of the Covenant's rule of reciprocity, it nevertheless exists within the parameters of this Covenant. Without the Covenant's contractual relation there can be no deeper integrity. In other words, a 'for naught' relation cannot be 'got at' by jumping outside the Covenant's rule of reciprocity into an alternative vision of justice. That the 'for naught' relation exists on a deeper level of this Covenant implies rather a transcendence within it. with anything, then this is first and foremost with the prologue and not the poem: 'and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had (before)' (42.1 Ob). 38. Against the backdrop of which significant aspects of asymmetry emerge. I will examine these shortly.

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On the other hand, the dynamic of the prologue as only promise, leaving us in the dark about the nature of Job's deeper integrity, calls out for us to look for signs of transformation within the epilogue. In other words, within the parallelism between prologue and epilogue, we expect also to find discontinuity; against the background of similarity, difference/ Beyond the chiastic structure, we will discover multiple similarities on an increasingly detailed level, accompanied by increasingly fine differences. 1 turn now to an exploration of these with a view to ascertaining their significance for the way in which the prologue-piety is transformed and critiqued in the epilogue. Noticeable, in the first place, is the common occurrence of sacrifice (1.5 cf. 42.8—9) and the way in which its dynamics are altered. While Job takes the initiative in the prologue, the sacrifice in the epilogue is performed at the invitation of God, who requests further that Job pray for his friends (v. 8), a prayer which, we are told explicitly (v. 9), he accepts. This alerts us to the fact that there is no direct intercourse between God and the human actors in the prologue. There is, rather, a disjunction between heavenly and earthly realms (emphasized by repeated scene-shifts). The only connection established, so it seems, is that of the Satan's journeying between the two and intervening in earthly affairs (most explicitly in 2.7). God's entire interaction with the humans on earth is thus mediated by the Satan.4 Hence it comes as something of a surprise when in the first scene of the epilogue the Lord addresses the friends directly (42.7f). And indeed, in the epilogue the Satan has entirely disappeared. Direct communication has replaced indirect: while the Satan effected the transition in the prologue from prosperity to desolation, prayer and its acceptance effect the parallel transition in the 39. HABI-L recognizes that *[the] design of the final prose section is clearly intended to parallel key features of the opening prose narrative' (p. 580), and notes several of the specific parallels that I enumerate below. He does not, however, go beyond this to a noting of the accompanying differences, regarding the epilogue simply as a restoration to the initial state of the prologue. 40. My hermeneutical approach in this interpretation of the prologue side by side with the epilogue is informed by R. Alter's analysis of the 'techniques of repetition' at work in biblical narratives in The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981): 'When, on the other hand, you are confronted with an extremely spare narrative, marked by formal symmetries, w7hich exhibits a high degree of literal repetition, what you have to look for more frequently is the small but revealing differences in the seeming similarities, the nodes of emergent new meanings in the pattern of regular expectations created by explicit repetition' (p. 97). In practice, this is more difficult than it sounds: the differences may be construed in different ways, and different differences may be emphasized, giving rise to divergent possibilities of interpretation. My reading offers one possible construal, but is naturally limited in what it selects for contemplation. 41. Cf. CLINKS, p. 9: 'The Satan, that is, though he is a character in the heavenly realm, eventually operates both on the heavenly plane and on the earthly plane . . . The breaking of the formal pattern signals the impingement of the divine world upon the human . . . God remains in heaven, uninvolved directly in the affliction of Job; the very possibility of movement from the heavenly sphere to the earthly accentuates the aloofness of God, who does not engage in any such movement.'

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epilogue to restoration (42.10). Thus, although on a first reading of the prologue one may not miss it, the presence of direct communication in the epilogue at least prompts one, on a re-reading of the prologue in its light, to wonder whether in the transition from prologue to epilogue something may not have been transformed within Job's relationship with God. Corresponding to this shift from indirectness to directness in the divinehuman relations, there is an analogous shift on the inter-human level. In the prologue Job makes his sacrifices in the absence of those for whom he makes them, perhaps even in the absence of their knowledge, and certainly in the absence of his direct knowledge of them — 'it may be that my children have sinned' (v. 5).4 In the epilogue the sacrifice is carried out by the friends in the presence of Job who prays for them. Taking both the initiative and the responsibility for absent others, Job in the prologue carries the burden of relationship to God on his own shoulders. This isolated, one-way relation is replaced in the epilogue by a three-way set of reciprocal relations (God makes an invitation to the friends; they sacrifice to him; Job prays to God on behalf of the friends and in their presence, and God accepts Job's prayer).44 This picture is filled out further in the multiple and smaller-scale correspondences and differences between the idyllic scene in the prologue (1.1-5) and the parallel idyllic scene at the end of the epilogue (42.10-16). First, in both cases eating is mentioned and the place of eating is named. In the prologue there is feasting in each of the various houses of Job's children in turn, and in the epilogue all come together in Job's house to eat bread, with the addition that all bring Job a coin and a gold ring (42.11). Conjured up in this latter portrayal is a distinctive sense of community, in which a purposeful coming together has replaced a sense of displacement and dispersion, and 42. Job's restoration is clearly linked in the text with his act of intercession, although the link is not specifically causal : 'when he prayed'), cf. GORDIS, HABEL, DRIVER-GRAY. GOOD, however, emphatically takes the link to be causal (and possibly even magical, pp. 385, 388). 43. I am following GORDIS here in my interpretation of 'he would send ) and sanctify them is 'used to initiate an action expressed by the finite verb ( following', and i refers to the ritual of expiation Job would conduct for his children, thus meaning 'he sanctified, purified them' (pp. 12-13). Cf. also DRIVER-GRAY. However, several commentators understand to mean 'he invited them' (to a sacrifice at his house or to a sacred banquet), which would entail their presence at the sacrifice (e.g. CLINES, HABEL). Gordis's arguments against this interpretation are compelling. 44. Already at this point it should be noted that my comparison has been selective. One might, for example, reverse the exercise by pointing out that Job's powerful affirmations of faith (1.21, 2.10) have no parallel in the epilogue. The differences, in other words, do not just move in one direction. We come up again against signs in the prologue of a deeper meaning that my reading cannot contain. Although I later reread the prologue for its greater depths (pp. 73—75 below), there are nevertheless aspects of it which transcend the bounds of my interpretation. 45. 'By eating with Job, his kinsmen and friends give public testimony that he is no longer a pariah or a leper', GORDIS, p. 489. It is, in other words, a sign of reintegration.

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in which there is a sharing of money, possessions, food and even sympathy: the sympathy of Job's friends ( ,2.11) has been relocated from the scene of the ash heap to within the community ( j , 42.11). In other words, a holistic picture is conjured up of what one might call a community of generosity. Second, lacking at the end of the idyllic scene in the epilogue is the phrase, 'thus did Job continually' (1.5b). This emphasis on the continual is replaced in the epilogue by a natural continuity both in Job's life (ending in death) and through the generations — a habitual cycle is replaced by the flow of life from generation to generation. In this light, the supposedly idyllic scene of the prologue appears rather as a burden, Job being the one who must shoulder, maintain, and even create the 'continual'.4' Finally, both idyllic scenes are described in terms of God's blessing (l.lOb and 42.12), but in the prologue this blessing is restricted to 'the work of [Job's] hands' while in the epilogue it is simply his latter days that are blessed, implying no such restriction. This compounds the sense of alienation in the prologue - Job from his possessions as from God and the community, as opposed to the holism of the epilogue in which it seems that God is present in the fullness of life and not just in calculable prosperity. These differences are, of course, in part due to the difference in circumstance: Job's great suffering and subsequent restoration has interrupted the 'continual' of the prologue such as to create a purpose for the community to gather and an occasion for their generosity, both of which were lacking in the prologue's opening scene. But this serves perhaps only to underline the point that Job's suffering allows us a deeper insight into his relation to God. What was not evident within the parameters of prologue, because the events recounted in 1.1—5 were restricted to the habitual, can be discovered in the epilogue, which in turn reveals what must already have been the case beneath the everyday of 1.1—5. In sum, these differences suggest that the static and contained world of the prologue is transformed in the epilogue into a world of dynamic interaction

46. Contra CLINILS: 'This unwavering routine, no burden to Job any more than it is to his children, is not a monotony but the ominous prelude to an irruption into the lives of all' (p. 17). Interesting in this connection is an observation made on the basis of Alter's description of the functions of narration at the beginning of the 'paradigmatic biblical story' (Narrative, p. 80). These are, first, the pretemporal exposition, second, the transitional segment in which verbs are to be construed as iterative or habitual, and third, the report of actions at specific points in time (the 'singulative' tense). The initial portrayal of Job's piety (1.1—5) occurs entirely within pretemporal exposition and habitual transition (hence the 'continually'). The first singulative to break the continual is in the heavenly court, and the sequence of singulatives following this involves what happens to Job and job's response to this, rather than what Job actively undertakes: Job is throughout the passive victim. This might cause us to view the portrayal of Job's piety in 1.1—5 in a different light: as the depiction of a false kind of responsibility in which Job shoulders the burden of relationship to God without becoming a real agent who undertakes singulative action.

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and overflow.47 In the prologue, what Job does is related to what God does but only in a sort of parallelism, matching the parallel relation between heaven and earth. We are told nothing of the deeper connection between Job and God. As already mentioned, 1.1—5 is quiet even about a more overt connection between Job's piety and God's blessing. The narration keeps to a strict parallelism. In the epilogue, by contrast, God plays an active part in Job's earthly relations, and Job's prayer forms a living connection between them. Beneath the contractual relation of the prologue, in other words, we discover in the epilogue a deeper connection. As a result, not only is the testing of Job's piety something of the past, the question of its proof is entirely out of place: the question of whether Job fulfils his side of the contract does not apply to the deeper connection between him and God, which is unconditional. Hence the atmosphere of the epilogue is one of overflowing abundance which may be enjoyed as gift. Exceeding the 48 superlative but ail-too calculable perfection of the prologue (cf. 1.3, 'this man was the greatest of all the people of the east'4 ), we have in the epilogue a conception of perfection as radically open, and of completion as continually being completed (cf. 42.12, cGod blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning'): an overflow in the everyday, in a transgenerational this-worldly flourishing, a vision in which death is a form of fullness — the appropriate end. Such, as we have so far gleaned, is the logic of obedience embodied by the epilogue.

3 The Defective Prologue-Piety in the Critical Light of the Epilogue In the light of this contrast, further nuances within the dynamics of the prologue can be discerned. On the one hand, viewing the contractual dimension of the prologue-piety in abstraction from its rootedness in something deeper, we start to notice cracks in Job's perfection. As part of the contractual, Job's obsessive sacrificing now appears as exactly that — an over-

47. Cf. Cook, The Root, p. 19: '[The] prose tale attributes the quality [integrity] to him in a summary, static way. In the verse drama, however, he subjects his integrity to a dynamic process of intellectual and emotional articulation.' Cook does not comment, however, on the way in which this integrity is transformed in the epilogue. 48. In which thus gains the sense of 'whole, complete', in keeping with its root , 'to be complete'; cf. DRIVKR-GRAY, p. 3. Such 'completion' is outwardly expressed in Job's 'ideal family' and the numbers of his animals, 'numbers which signify completion' (HABL-L, p. 87). It is precisely this conception of integrity as perfect wholeness that is subjected to radical critique in the rest of the book. (For a fuller investigation of the meaning of the root and its derivatives, see Chapter 6, esp. n. 17.) 49. In the Hebrew, this is not a grammatical superlative (in which the adjective would require a definite article), but it expresses a superlative idea.

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scrupulous guarding against scarcity, even in the midst of plenty.50 The burden of having to fulfil his side of the contract, in other words, induces the fear that his idyllic lifestyle might end — an eventuality which he has responsibility to prevent/ Perhaps more than this, Job senses the fragility of the contract and the possibility at any point that God might decide to withdraw his blessing. This fear seems to have vanished in the epilogue just as the Satan has vanished, as if the Satan were himself the embodiment of this fear. Moreover, the Satan's influential role in the heavenly court suggests that this fear on Job's side is paralleled on God's side by a niggling doubt in the faithfulness of his servant, setting him into action against Job. The elision of the Satan with God's fear is perhaps not a big step from here/" On this contractual level, then, fear and suspicion are on both sides the dominant note, and unavoidably so, it would seem: for if the contract is all that there is, its breaking is fatal/ ~ Corresponding to the cracks in this apparently perfect picture are the intimations of blemish under the surface in Job's 'perfect' response to the destruction inflicted upon him by the Lord. These emerge only after the second attack. The second response is similar to and corresponds to the first - but with the following differences: Job no longer blesses the name of the Lord; he responds with a question asked from a human perspective rather than an assertion from a divine perspective; and he is said not to have sinned

50. Cf. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom, p. 92: 'Only one thing marred this idyllic existence: Job seemed overly anxious that his sons (or children) may inadvertently have sinned against God. So the suspicious father took proper precautions to ward off an angry deity'; CLINKS, p. 15: 'Job's piety is scrupulous, even excessively so, if not actually neurotically anxious. It would not be absurd to see here an almost obsessional manie de perfection, a hypersensitivity to detail.' 51. Cf. E. van Wolde, Mr and Mrs job (trans. J. Bowden, London: SCM, 1997), p. 14: '[Job gives] the impression of being a believer who thinks he must not make any mistakes and has to be in control of everything.' Cf. also K. Wiesel, ')ob', in Z. Garber and R. IJbowitx, (eds.), Peace, in Deed: tissays in Honour of Harry James Cargas (eels. J. Neusner, B.D. Chilton, et a/.; South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism, 162; Atlanta: Scholars Press), pp. 119—34 (121): 'Is it possible that the author intended to offer us a clue about his hesitations with regard to his character? "Vehaya haisb hahu" and that man was perfect, upright, evilavoiding BECAUSE he was fearing God? In that case, the prologue of the prologue could be read to indicate a warning: lyov was not such a t^addik as he wanted to appear; granted, he had done many good things — but do you know why? Because he was afraid of God.' 52. Cf. CLINKS, p. 22.' ^ 53. It would be dangerous to translate this too directly into a description of the nature of God. For the kind of God that the prologue portrays, see below, pp. 74—75. HABKL resolves this issue far too easily: 'Through the dialogue Yahweh is portrayed as a deity unwilling to avoid a challenge and driven by a desire to be right at all costs' (p. 85). Crenshaw recognixes something of the difficulty of the issue: 'Whoever pauses to assess this narrative from a theological perspective discerns that discordant sounds produced by a seemingly amoral deity are balanced by melodious chords occasioned by God's unshakable faith in job's integrity* (Old Testament Wisdom, p. 94).

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'with his lips' (2.10).54 Against the background of strict parallelism and in the critical light of the epilogue, these divergences bring into question the purity and assuredness of Job's response. It seems plausible, more specifically, that we have here a suggestion of deeper undercurrents within Job's response than are apparent within the parameters of the prologue, and that these depths represent a much more complex concept of obedience than can be contained within its piety and Job's correspondingly simple response, which parallels the perfection of his beginnings. In other words, to anticipate, the deficiencies in Job's response are not just a critique of the prologue-piety, but more positively signs of something deeper which both undergirds and transcends it. The slight note of fear in the prologue would explain Job's otherwise oblique reference in 3.25 to 'the thing ( ) which I feared ( / as having now come upon him. This is a unique moment in which a shaft of light is cast backward onto the inner thoughts and emotions of Job as he was before his affliction by God, and thus the Job of the prologue's opening scene — who otherwise remains absolutely opaque to us/' Only in the light of the critical movement of the whole book, however, and the shadow which the epilogue retrospectively casts on the prologue, does it start to make sense - as we begin to see the prologue with new eyes. In the above I have described this fear as a fear of scarcity and, implicitly, as a fear of unfaithfulness on the part of God. But as is signalled by the occurrence of the same word for fear, (pachad)^ in Deut. 28.66 in reference to the dread that Israel experiences under the curses of God, this is, of course, more specifically the fear that God will break the Covenant — by cursing Job when blessing was due. And this is indeed what happens!

54. Cf. van Wolde, Mr and Mrs Job, pp. 23—27. Van Wolde interprets these differences in Job's second reaction as having been caused by what Mrs Job says. Mrs. Job is thus considered as taking on a very important function in the book as a whole: she is the one wrho, in effect, triggers the transition from the prologue to the poem, having transformed Job from a believer who knows for certain into a questioner. This is a pregnant suggestion which it would be fruitful to develop. In respect of the addition 'with his lips', she remarks: 'He can get no blessing or sin through his lips, but inside some doubt seems to have been sown' (p. 25). ROWLEY, by contrast, denies any such negative implication: 'It is not implied that he sinned in any other way. It was sin with the lips that Satan had predicted, and the prediction is emphatically declared to have remained unfulfilled' (p. 37). 55. Van Wolde understands this reference to fear in chapter 3 as a hinge between the prologue and the dialogue. 'The ambiguity in Job's piety mentioned in the prologue is thus confirmed by Job himself (Mr and Mrs Job, p. 39). Cf. CLINES, p. 103: 'Job's expression of his anxiety [in 3.25] harmonises well with the depiction of him in 1.1-5'; and GOOD, pp. 207—08. Contra HABEL, ROWLEY, GORDIS, who construe the verse as a reference to a present fear or debilitating mental anguish.

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4 A Shift in Perspective: A yet Deeper Reading of the Prologue However, the contrast between the differing worlds of the prologue and epilogue is not such that it sheds only negative light on the prologue, an improved model of piety being offered in the epilogue. For the nature of the contrast is not one of competition in which the prologue-piety is displaced and left behind as something inferior. Indeed, as we have seen, the epilogue remains firmly within the orbit of the Deuteronomic Covenant. Rather, the shift is one from the superlative to the comparative, and therefore implicitly involves the critique of any attempt to define piety within certain bounds, capturing it in a static concept. For the comparative is precisely that which escapes such bounds, not allowing for final definition. It says in effect, 'Wherever you set your standard of perfection, I will show that it can be exceeded.' Thus, although the epilogue provides a vision that exceeds the static perfection of the prologue, it does not claim for itself this status of perfection, but effects rather a shift in perspective. Rather than concentrate on the measurable and definable perfection germane to Job's contractual relation with God, it looks beyond this to the organic relation that underlies it, where growth and movement rather than static perfection are in view. It shifts its gaze, in other words, from the Covenant's level of reciprocal action to that which lies ever deeper than this. This deeper dimension to Job's covenantal relation with God cannot displace his prologue-piety because it is precisely a deeper dimension of it, and can only exist within the contractual structure it provides. The epilogue, then, embodies the deeper dimension of the Covenant which was only present as promise within the prologue, being indiscernible within its parameters. But as such, it allows us to perceive, in another retrospective glance, deeper dimensions within the prologue itself. Job's ability to persist in his integrity, put to the test in the prologue, is a mark of whether there is anything deeper to the Covenant than its reciprocal level of action. But this is not just a question about Job's integrity and its deeper dimension, but also a question about a deeper commitment to Job on the part of God. As we discover in the epilogue, Job's dynamic and overflowing piety, no longer hemmed in by a fear of the withdrawal of God's blessing, is dependent on his reception of God's blessing as gift, which in turn is rooted in a deeper, unconditional connection with the living God. In other words, the deeper dimension of the Covenant is bound up with the very character of God as one who gives himself unconditionally to Job/ ' Therefore, when 56. God's intrinsically covenantal nature is even more evident in the poem, where, in a dissection and critique of Job's integrity, the deeper dimension of the Covenant is explored in its basic logic. God's basic and unshakeable commitment to Job is expressed negatively, for example, in 7.19b: '[How long wilt thou not] let me alone (literally "forsake me", ) till I swallow my spittle?' The implications of this are brought out when we look at it in the light of Deut. 4.31 (cf. also Deut. 31.6, 8), where we also find the verb 'forsake': 'Because t h e Lord your G o d i s a merciful ) God, h e will neither forsake ( )

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God makes his wager with the Satan, he is not only allowing Job's integrity to be put to the test, but is also allowing himself to be put to the test, as one whose own character is bound up with Job's. If Job fails the test, making a farce of the Covenant, it is God's own character as a covenantal God that will be undermined, shown to be hollow, and so brought into disrepute. But this implies, further, that God's very taking up of the wager with the Satan is to stake his own name on Job/ It already, in other words, demonstrates God's intrinsic covenantal nature. God stakes his name on Job, moreover, 'for naught', as 2.3 states: 'He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for naught ( , chinnam)" In other words, what God requires of Job, that he serve God for naught, is what God has already done for Job/ From the very beginning God identifies Job as his servant (1.8, 2.3), and continues to hold onto him as such. But this also has ramifications for Job's piety as portrayed in the prologue. If Job is primarily and most fundamentally the servant of God, and not just according to God's claim but according to the very dynamics of their relationship (God's unconditional commitment to Job), then Job's piety as described in 1.1—5 must in some sense be a manifestation of this servanthood. If it is put to the test and subjected to fundamental critique, it is, in God's wager, even more fundamentally affirmed by God. God does not commit his cause to a Job behind or beneath these acts but to a Job in these acts, in this particular human historicity; Just as one cannot jump out of the Deuteronomic Covenant, one cannot jump out of such particular historicity. One might say that there will always be a contractual dimension to one's relationship to God (an element of fear), even if this is not where the 'for naught' aspect is to be located. Rather, the contractual is affirmed to the extent that it continually points beyond itself to something deeper. Indeed, it is God's very affirmation of the Job of the prologue (the wager in which he commits his cause to Job) that causes Job's prologue-piety to point beyond itself by effecting the transition from prologue to epilogue, or 'more' of the prologue. All this might allow us to comment on what the prologue tells us about the nature of God. It is integral to the narrative that God does not know how Job

you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them.' Forsake Job, i.e. abandon the Covenant, is what God will never do. And he cannot do so because it is rooted in his very nature as the merciful one. The Covenant might be 'broken' in God's affliction of Job, i.e. wounded and in need of healing, but God never finally lets go of Job. This is the Covenant's deeper dimension, and is the reason why Job cannot escape the searching scrutiny of God. 57. Cf. Chapter 1, p. 19. 58. The converse point is made by CLINES, p. 26: '[Job's] piety is revealed to be a kind of imitatio Dei, whose workings are equally gratuitous and inexplicable.'

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is going to fare; the test would otherwise be pointless/ Thus God has doubt. In other words, he is part of a genuine drama and cannot simply jump out of it into his omniscience. But what is the nature of this drama and the God it seeks to portray? It might be helpful to make a comparison with the way in which God is portrayed in the Akedah. Here God tests Abraham (Gen. 22.1) in order to know whether or not he fears God: 'Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me' (22.12). Moberly offers an insightful interpretation of God's 'need to know' here: 'the usage of nissah [to test] in conjunction with "know" indicates a further dimension of divine involvement — in essence that the test and its outcome matters to God. It is an implication at one with the portrayal of God as one who elects and enters into covenant, in which the relationship thereby constituted is a real relationship which engages God as genuinely as it does Israel. The logic of God's "need to know" is that of relationship and response.'' This neither denies the pertinence of the anthropomorphic language used of God, nor interprets it flatly. It seeks rather to do justice to the real drama. However, Moberly says no more about the nature of God's engagement with Israel and of the drama in which he is involved. In my interpretation of the prologue to Job, therefore, I will probe slightly further. It seems that this drama has the cumulative purpose of conveying a God who is willing to, and indeed does, identify his own cause with that of Job, and who cannot now retreat from this vulnerability to a hidden God behind this relationship.6 There is, indeed, no such hidden God to which God could retreat. Thus, his choice or election of Job as his servant is absolutely primary and radically selfdefining — and as such eternal. In other words, God has chosen for himself a fundamentally historical identity, i.e. one which is radically bound up with his relation to the historical particularities of creation.62 I will discuss this claim in all its theological implications in the penultimate chapter.

59. There are other reasons why the narrator might want to set up the test, e.g. in order to convince the reader as to the genuineness of Job's integrity. But within the limits of the story, read for its plain sense, God's need to test Job can only be for his own reassurance. The alternative is to understand the wager as having the purpose simply of proving a point to the Satan. But there are no clues in the text that God is any wiser than the Satan. And if the text's temporality and contingency are taken seriously, the outcome of the test is something that can only be established in the course of time. 60. Moberly, The bible, p. 105. 61. Cf. Barth, for whom there is no God behind the God we have in the crucified Jesus Christ (CD 1V.3, pp. 396-97). 62. CLINKS lays down a challenge for any interpreter of the prologue: 'The God of the story is more "human" than many would care to admit; any appropriate reading of the story will preserve that flavor' (p. 22). In the construal of the God of the prologue offered here, I hope to have done this, if not in quite the way that Clines had envisaged.

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5 Hermeneutical Reflection Interpreters of this prose narrative are faced with a hermeneutical problem arising from what Clines calls its 'false naivety'.6" On the one hand, it is a stylized narrative which encodes its meaning by way of certain narrative conventions.64 On the other hand, it constantly raises questions in the reader about the motives, feelings and deeper psychological dispositions of the characters, questions which bypass the conventions that have been carefully employed by the text. This results in two possible tendencies of interpretation. The first is to explain all notable features of the text as the result of its use of particular conventions, and thus to reduce the text to its conventions to such an extent that it is drained of any nuance of meaning. This is to deny, first, that conventions are employed in order to convey meaning, and second, that they can themselves be manipulated in an innovative way in relation to their normative usage in the wider traditions in which they are embedded.65 The second tendency is to ignore these conventions completely, and follow its various signs of meaning in an entirely arbitrary way, abandoning any coherence the text might have in favour of a random accumulation of fragments of meaning.6 In relation to the prose narrative of Job in particular, this is most prevalent in what might be called a 'psychologizing' of the text, in which the categories of modern psychology are employed to glean psychological conclusions about the characters' words and actions directly from certain features of the text, without regard to the conventions according to which these words and actions make sense. These opposing tendencies are found to varying degrees in the different modern scholarly interpretations of Job. In Clines's commentary we find both placed provocatively side by side, in such a way that the problem is set before us in the starkest manner possible. The commentary, it seems, is itself a wrestling precisely with this problem. For example, we read on 1.6: 'the fact 63. E.g. CLINES, p. 9. 64. '[Like] the unsophisticated language of these chapters, the plainness of the structure suggests, not a primitive narrative mode, but a subtle artistic severity' (CLINES, p. 9). 65. Cf. Alter, Narrative, Chapter 3, 'Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention', pp. 47— 62. 66. The hermeneutical problem represented in this opposition has a much wider purview than simply the prose narrative of the book of Job. In The Bible, Moberly discusses what is basically the same problematic both in relation to other biblical texts and more generally, identifying tendencies analogous to those I have outlined here. However, the problem is perhaps more acute in relation to the prose narrative of Job because of its highly 'conventional' character - that which gives it the air of a folktale. For this gives it, on the one hand, an opacity that prevents its meaning from being gleaned directly from the text, and on the other, an immediacy in which the characters and events are placed before us (often by means of dialogue) without obvious narratorial mediation. 67. Van Wolde's Mr and Mrs Job is one of the best examples of a purely 'psychologizing' approach. Her method seems to be imaginatively to put herself in the shoes of the various characters in order to understand the psychological factors that might have been at play. Wiesel's 'Job', although methodologically less uniform, also exhibits this tendency.

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that the Satan is singled out for God's inquiry has no other purpose than a narrative one: in some way the dialogue of God and the Satan must be set in train; what more natural means than to have God ask of the Satan the question we may safely assume is consistently addressed to all the "sons of God" who arrive at he court with something to report?' (p. 19); and then: 'When all that is said, the role of the Satan remains tantalizing. The freedom with which he can address his lord, the influence he can have upon him, and the plenipotentiary powers granted him all seem more at home in a polytheistic culture than in the world of the OT' (p. 21). Further, still on 1.6: 'Perhaps it puts it overdramatically to represent the Satan as a manifestation of divine doubt, an embodiment of the demonic wrath of God . . . But Job himself experiences his suffering as manifestations of God's wrath ... and the notion of divine uncertainty is not foreign to the OT' (p. 22); and then on 1.7: 'Such a question does not imply ignorance on God's part . . . The question has a dramatic function in focusing upon the Satan . . . and in providing an impetus for the ensuing conversation and its sequel' (p. 23). Finally, on 1.8: '[Herein] lies the "false" naivety of the storyteller's style: God's question is both guileless and pregnant with implication. To hear it simply as a challenge to the Satan is too sophisticated; to take it purely at its face value is to fall prey to the artful naivety of the narrative' (pp. 24—25). This almost amounts to an explicit recognition of the problem, and of the need to search for a 'middle way.•) 68 However, Clines ultimately leaves the conflict intact, offering no sort of resolution to the interpretative dilemma.' The 'false naivety' of the prose narrative is simply the name he has given to this problem. In my interpretation of the prose narrative, by contrast, I have attempted to address, and negotiate a way through, just this dilemma. I hope to have done so, furthermore, in a way that is maximally open to the various indications of meaning within the text/ It might seem that Clines has done just this by leaving the interpretative conflict in place. However, by letting the text in this way say everything, Clines has in fact prevented it from saying anything — that is, anything specific. In other words, a maximal openness to the text necessarily involves a certain specificity of interpretation. I have sought such specificity, above all, by pinpointing the Satan's question in 1.9 as a hermeneutical key. This involved a structured reading in which my aim was to honour the conventions of the text on the one hand, and to give psychologizing readings their proper place on the other. Focusing on the Satan's question invited, in the first place, an exploration of the nature of the 68. We find a similar recognition in Crenshaw, Old 'Testament Wisdom: 'the tension between profound questions and nai've theology prevents one from dismissing the story as trite' (p. 95, cf. also p. 94). 69. Although he does at times offer readings that go beyond the dichotomy, e.g. in his understanding of the 'sons of God' as a method for conceptualizing a God who is both transcendent and immanent (p. 21). 70. There are, no doubt, many different ways of being thus open to the text.

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piety set up in the prologue and brought in question by the Satan. This exploration, informed by the poem, involved a long intrascriptural detour. But it allowed us, eventually, to identify a 'prologue-piety', and to read the prologue as opening up an aporia in this. Second, the presence of the poem in between the prologue and epilogue — preventing this aporia from being suppressed and closed up again - forestalled a reading of the epilogue as a retreat into the unproblematic world of the prologue, encouraging us rather to look for the marks it bears of the prologue's dismantling and reassembling. This involved a comparison of the prologue and epilogue which was shaped by an understanding of the kind of narrative conventions at play within the Hebrew Bible more widely: for instance, the way slight deviation from repetition or symmetry can be a subtle method of character portrayal, by this economy of means conveying depths of meaning. This, third, created the opening for a 'psychologizing' reading of the prologue, and not of an arbitrary sort but specifically in the critical light of the epilogue. Finally, the prologue was reread, also in the light of the epilogue, for an even deeper level of meaning, culminating in an inference about the nature of God that the prologue intends to convey. In other words, what I have offered is a layered or stratified reading in which competing insights have been taken into account on different planes; not according to arbitrary preference but within a rigorous and differentiated matrix of meaning. For example: Job's scrupulous sacrificing is understood according to the first reading of the prologue to convey the hyperbolic perfection of his Covenant piety, and according to the second critical reading, his possible over-scrupulosity. Again, according to the second reading, God's doubt is understood as an indication of his alienation from Job, of the contractual nature of their relationship, but according to the third deeper reading, as an index of his involvement with creation and ultimately of his election of Job.

4 The Poem

In the previous chapter, much by way of anticipation was said of the poem, placing on it a large weight of expectation. As that which 'persists' beyond the parameters of the prologue, it is, we have said, that which takes up the aporia of the prologue in an exploration of the deeper dimension of the Covenant — both in critique of the prologue-piety and in construction of a 'for naught' relation between God and Job. Whereas the epilogue gave embodiment to this 'for naught' relation, the poem achieves its exploratory critique by means of dissection, examining the internal structure of Job's obedience. We learnt to talk about the dynamics of the prose narrative in terms of the Deuteronomic Covenant, its world of blessing and cursing, and a deeper dimension which transcends its contractual framework. In the poem also, in an exploration of its deeper dimension, it is the Deuteronomic Covenant that is at stake. However, we enter in the poem a new symbolic world — Job's internal world; and this requires that we discover and develop a new language with which to talk about it. Indeed, the Covenant will gain in this connection wider and richer associations. The language I develop in order to explore these will emerge in the course of my analysis, but in service of this analysis, and the work of conceptual translation involved, I will draw on psychophilosophical discourse. The introduction of the latter will allow us, in turn, to trace in more detail the contours of the dialogue between Job and his friends, and the development undergone by Job in the course of this which brings him to the mind-blowing encounter and insight of the Whirlwind speeches.

I. The Dialogue Testing Integrity

1 Job as Remainder In chapter 3, we find Job stripped of all his previous predicates, those of his identity as a man of matchless piety (cf. 1.3). The man, Job, nevertheless remains. This remainder is the first indication that there is something more to the Covenant than is beheld at the level of reciprocal action. And it is as this remainder that Job experiences, and first begins to conceptualize, his pain. What is entailed in this is thrown into relief by the response of Job's friends. Eliphaz, followed by the others, attempts to reinscribe Job within the Deuteronomic socio-symbolic universe, within which well-being signifies righteousness and suffering wickedness. This is, in other words, the contractual dimension of the Covenant, now understood more explicitly as a socially constructed world of meaning which Job shares with his friends. The Covenant does not just entail Job's conception of God as one who blesses and curses the righteous and the wicked respectively, but has an inextricably public dimension: within its framework suffering and prosperity are imbued with a social significance beyond their basic factuality, becoming public signs whose meaning extends beyond the purview of the individual's relation with God. It is Job's relation to this socio-symbolic universe that has been brought in question by his affliction, which has ruptured and defigured the identity he had within its parameters. Eliphaz's attempted reinscription involves, first, a recollection of the predicates Job once enjoyed and which may provide continuity with the present: 'See, you have instructed many; you have strengthened the weak hands. Your words have supported those who were stumbling, and you have made firm the feeble knees' (4.3—4). He then redescribes what has happened to Job by placing it within the context of wellworn generalities: 'Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?' (4.7, but see 4.5—11). Having offered a diagnosis, he then prescribes the cure: 'As for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause' (5.8), which provided Job adheres to it, will further reintegrate Job into the socio-symbolic universe with which he is presently out of joint. In relation to this distanced reflection on Job's affliction, which attempts to make sense of it and so numb its frightening — because fundamentally

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nonsensical — nature, Job's own response in chapter 3 stands out in its distinctiveness: he offers no explanation, nor does he seek one; he does not even attempt to circumscribe his affliction by describing it, but rather lets his pain speak, and more, act. He gives free reign to its effectual power, preventing it under any circumstances from being reinscribed within the commonly accepted meaningful social fabric. It has the force of breaking out of this, a force that Job refuses to allow to be harnessed simply to reinforce this social fabric, which is what he would do by turning to God in repentance, as suggested by Eliphaz in 5.8. In other words, Job is more than his predicates, and in his first monologue he lets his pain speak out as an index of this remainder, what we might call his singularity. The rift that has emerged here is that between Job's socio-symbolic identity — according to which as sufferer he is also sinner — and depths to Job which cannot be captured by this label. This is precisely equivalent to the distinction, made within the Deuteronomic Covenant, between Job's prologue-piety — inseparable from God's blessings — and his deeper integrity, which could not be conceived within the contractual dimension of the Covenant. The Covenant determines, therefore, not only Job's identity as God's servant, but also his identity and role within society. It is this which his deeper integrity, or singularity, transcends. We understand more about the pain of Job's singularity when Job begins to cast God as his enemy (e.g. 6.4, 16.9). Job experiences his affliction as directly from the hand of God: Tor he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause' (9.17, cf. 16.6E). It is God who keeps him in existence as this remainder, an existence constituted by meaningless misery (3.20—24) and from which he longs to be cut off: CO that I might have my request, and that God would grant my desire; that it would please God to 1. My construal of this distinction is informed by Eric Santner's On the Psychotheology ofHveryday LJfe: Reflections on Freud and R0sen%jveig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). In his terms, following Franz Rosenzweig, it is that between 'personality' (which consists of a person's predicates) and 'self, in which resides her singularity, or irreducible self-sameness (pp. 7Iff). With this, we are entering a whole conceptual apparatus which resonates considerably with the thought-world in which the book of Job is moving. Because I will have cause to draw upon this a fair amount in what follows, it will be useful here to offer a brief introduction to both of these thinkers. In his major work, The Star of Redemption (trans. W.W. Hallo; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), the Jewish philosopher Rosenzweig's concern is to go beyond the 'totalising philosophy' prevalent in his German Idealist heritage. Characteristic of this philosophy, according to Rosenzweig, is its denial of the singular self, which it swallows up in its system. Santner's aim in his recent book, Psychotheology, is to bring Rosenzweig into dialogue with Freud, both in order to explore the theological dimensions of Freud's work and to bring to light the psychoanalytic implications of Rosenzweig's philosophy. While drawing on the work of these thinkers (and Santner's Psychotheology in particular), I hope to keep the conceptual apparatus itself in the background. 2. Cf. CLINKS on 6.4: 'Above all, this sentence crystallizes the nature of Job's suffering. It is neither the physical pain nor the mental anguish that weighs him down, but the consciousness that he has become God's enemy' (p. 171).

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crush me, that he would let loose his hand and cut me off!' (6.8—9 cf. 3.3£). It would seem that God, Job's enemy, is the correlate of Job's singularity, holding Job in an existence which cannot be made sense of within normal socio-symbolic categories. At the root of Job's singularity, more specifically, is God's arbitrary action of breaking the contractual Covenant, gratuitously afflicting the pious Job. Moreover, as we will discover, it is not just a matter of this one arbitrary action — this one instance of a breach of Covenant, but more seriously of an arbitrariness that pervades the whole Covenant. The non-sense of Job's singularity, in other words, is called forth by an equally non-sensical arbitrariness at the base of the Covenant. For Job is held in an existence in which all the particulars of the covenantal law are suspended while its sovereign authority remains in force (a remainder which corresponds exactly to the remainder of Job's existence).3 Job, although righteous, is cursed by God. The legal connection between suffering and sin is severed. But the law nevertheless retains its force to condemn Job. As such, it can condemn him to a punishment which no longer signifies his wickedness. The breaking of the rules of the law results in a breakdown of signification, but not in a disintegration of the law itself: the latter's hollow authority persists. This exposes the whole edifice of the law to be grounded in an arbitrary authority whose force cannot be legally challenged. Its grounding can therefore only be an act of violence, sustaining the boundaries of the law by a continual repetition of coercion. And because there is no further court of appeal to which one could turn, this is ultimately a self-grounding — or worse, a lack of ground that issues in violent circularity. It is simply a matter of 'God defines what is good, so you can't argue with it.' This ultimate lack of ground, or hollow authority bereft of significance, lies also at the heart of the friends' construal of the covenantal law (conceived in its basics in terms of the doctrine of retribution). In this system, the wicked are symbolically defined in terms of the calamities that befall them, and the righteous in terms of the prosperity that ensues for them. But there is nothing outside this closed circuit that gives one a further grip on what it really means to be good. We are ultimately stuck with relatives. And this goes for the whole of the socio-symbolic system within which the friends try to inscribe Job. For the symbols only gain meaning with respect to one another, and at some point this chain of transferences bottoms out and encounters a missing link. But this missing link is precisely everywhere present as 'something rotten in law'.5 It is this self-groundedness, or rather lack of 3. What Santner, following Agamben, refers to as the 'state of exception' (see Psychotheology, pp. 40-42). On Job's relation to the law, see also chapters 5 and 6, pp. 123ff. (where God's arbitrariness is conceived in terms of Job's lack of a or intercessor); and pp. 143ff (an examination of Job's 'mock trial' in Job 9 in terms of his exposure of the arbitrariness at the base of the law). 4. Cf. Santner, Psychotheology, pp. 56ff. 5. Psychotheology., p. 58 (quoting Benjamin).

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ultimate ground, that causes the friends again and again to cite the tradition. This repeated citation corresponds to the law's repeated act of violence in its own establishment. This arbitrariness or violence at the basis of the law, Job equates directly with God. In response to his owrn rhetorical question in 9.2: 'but how can a mortal be just before God?', Job goes on to describe God's justice in terms of his might, more specifically his arbitrarily destructive might. Job exposes this might to be that which ultimately founds and sustains God's justice — the force behind it. This obliquely responds to Bildad's question in 8.3: 'Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?' Job's answer is in essence, 'No, but only because his justice is already corrupt at its core, being founded on the "perversion" of God's arbitrary power.' Hence 9.19: 'If it is a contest of strength, he is the strong one! If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?' The parallelism brings strength and justice under the same banner. And this accounts for the state Job finds himself in in 9.20: 'Though I am innocent, my mouth would condemn me; though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse.' This is the non-sense of Job's singularity, his break with the normal functioning of the law — in Santner's terms, his being held by God in the 'state of exception'.6 The breakdown of signification entailed in God's arbitrary wielding of the law comes to a head in 9.22, where the most basic distinction between the blameless and the wicked no longer has any meaning.

2 The Non-sense of the Self In sum, by investing him with an identity which no longer has any significance for him, the law calls into existence Job's singularity: his existence as a remainder 'beyond' the socio-symbolic matrix of meaningful relations, a remainder which resists all attempts to give it meaning. The non-sense of Job's singularity corresponds to the non-sense or arbitrariness at the heart of the law. But what precisely is the nature of this non-sense (at either pole)? The ambivalence of its status has already been witnessed in the nature of the law's sovereignty as something violent and therefore real, on the one hand, and on the other, as a mere phantom of authority conjured up by the infinite selfreferential citation of the law, as a missing link, which is as such unreal. Santner locates this non-sense in the depths of the person, identifying it as a kernel of psychic activity which resists, transcends and exceeds the processes of meaning-making within the socio-symbolic system. Not only Job's singularity, but also the arbitrariness of the law that calls it into being, is thereby understood as something fundamentally personal. But this is to recognize the law's nature as — more than a theoretical system of equivalences - an interpersonal reality; constituted at the level of community. Thus Job's 6. Cf. n. 3. 7. In an interpretation of Freud's theory of the unconscious (see Psychotheology, pp. 28ff.).

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singularity is called forth, not by an impersonal arbitrariness at the root of a theoretical system, but by the impact of a personal Other, whether this be another person, community, tradition, or even God. In my interaction with others, I experience — beyond the socio-symbolic conventions by which this is ordered — the irreducibility of the other's claim or hold on me by virtue of her sheer humanness. It is this claim, or unthematized desire, of the other that calls forth and constitutes in me my singularity. In this way, I have a pre-thematized recognition of the other in her human depths and true otherness. But this sheer humanness of the other, as I have called it, is also that which is most unfathomable or other to her — it is her singularity. As Santner puts it, my singularity or internal alienness, '... [is] held in place by external alien-ness; external alien-ness [is], in turn, held in place by the enigmatic relation of the other to [her] own internal alien ...' And the other's singularity has been called forth in her by my own singularity. In other words, my recognition of the other is an irreducible recognition of the other's recognition of me. We have, then, a mutual eliciting in which each calls forth and constitutes the human depths or otherness of the other. To use Santner's terms, this experience of the other's claim on me is my exposure to the 'enigmatic messages' of the other. It is the labour of my psychic apparatus to metabolize or interpret these messages, i.e. to translate the 'excitations' or mental energy they call forth in me into meaningful ideas. However, the very nature of these excitations, as non-sensical or unthematizable, is to resist interpretation. Every attempt at interpretation, therefore, leaves a remainder in me. This is my own internal alienness — or surplus animation — which corresponds to a surplus animation within the other. That which remains enigmatic for me in the communication of the other is, as I have said, that which was already enigmatic for the other herself. The default way of dealing with this surplus animation, which we witness in the friends' response to Job, is to bind it in tidy accounts of the world, ideologies or world-views. Confronted by Job's non-sensical affliction, the friends attempt to make sense of it by incorporating it into exactly such explanatory accounts. These 'fantasies', as Santner calls them, sustain one's sense of the consistency of the world by creating the illusion of a space beyond it which would serve as its final legitimating ground. They secure one's adaptation to the world, therefore, by placing one 'outside' it, from where one can look on without becoming embroiled in its bewildering complexity. In this way, they operate as defences against the alien and enigmatic presence of the other. Bound in fantasies, this no longer poses a threat to the socio-symbolic system which gives the world its intelligibility. Indeed, this surplus, even as it constitutes a remainder in respect of the socio-

8. Psychotheology, p. 36, quoting Laplanche. 9. Psychotheology, pp. 33-37, again following Laplanche.

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symbolic system, is thus channelled in such a way as to sustain it, thereby functioning paradoxically as its driving force.10 This work of interpretation of the enigmatic messages of the other, in which they are harnessed to sustain the socio-symbolic order, breaks down when the remainder created in the process of translation is simply too much. As a result, the subject will no longer be able to find any coherence in the world, which will consequently cease to be for her a habitable place. Rather, its ultimate non-sense will overcome her and prevent her from finding her bearings among the mass of fragments the world has become for her. What Santner is primarily interested in, however, is neither the normal functioning of translation nor its breakdown, but the possibility of a different sort of intervention into the syntax of the socio-symbolic order and the seemingly endless drama of legitimation. And it is precisely the driving force of this order, its troubling surplus, that can, according to Santner, become the locus of a break with it, the possibility of unplugging from it. Bound by fantasies, this surplus holds the subject's world together by holding her at a distance from it, and most importantly from the enigmatic presence of the other. At stake, then, is a suspension of these fantasies which would convert the 'non-relational' surplus from being that which holds me at a distance from my neighbour into a mode of opening or nearness to her. Two registers of existence thus open up: that of relations within the socio-symbolic order, in which the other is reduced to her identity or role within this order (as is Job in relation to the friends); and that of ethical encounter, which consists in my opening to the other in her metaethical selfhood or singularity, involving a different sort of 'belonging-together on the basis of a non-relational surplus in myself and in my neighbour' (p. 105). The latter effects what Santner describes as a shift from the part-whole logic of relations within the sociosymbolic system to its own part-part logic, in which the parts are not parts of any wholes (p. 90). What is involved in Job's existence as a remainder beyond the Deuteronomic socio-symbolic system is something which can only be determined by a close examination of his painful journey as portrayed in the text. In undertaking this, I will not consider him simply as a case to be made sense of in terms of Santner's theory, but will attempt to go deeper into the particularity of Job's own journey and the ramifications this might have for the possibility of a form of life that is not simply subsumed in the relations of the socio-symbolic system and its drama of legitimation, but rather attests and opens itself up to the singularity of the self. This possibility will turn out to be precisely what I have been calling up to now the possibility of a 'for naught' relationship to God.

10. Cf. Psychotheolo^ pp. 39-40. 11. Santner explores the dynamics of such breakdown by considering that of the Supreme Court judge, D.P. Schreber, Freud's famous case study (Psychotheology, pp. 46—55).

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3 Job's Pain in Chapter 3 A general word before plunging into the detail: Job's monologue in chapter 3 emerges in what follows as something of a generative leitmotiv, or recurring impasse (to pick up on another of the connotations of this non-sensical remainder). Indeed, the dialogue between Job and his friends does appear to be in a sort of rondo form, in which each of Job's new speeches might be viewed as a commentary upon his opening monologue, which gains each time an accretion that allows us to see it in a new light. Hence a full conceptualization of the dynamic of this monologue is only worked out during the course of the dialogue, and as I will endeavour to show, gains its true significance and rationale only in the climax of the Whirlwind speeches, which act somewhat as the counterpole to this first monologue. As I have already noted, what Job fails to do in his monologue is to conceptualize his pain and thus to direct his energies towards its reinscription within a meaningful social order. Up to the end of the prologue, this social fabric is still intact and Job's affliction, rather than creating any sort of rift within it, is (re)channelled towards its sustaining. Job's first response (1.20— 21) is an act of mourning and worship, and ritualized in this way provides a continuity with his way of life up till now. In blessing the Lord (1.21), moreover, Job sustains his Covenant with God on its level of reciprocal action — despite its having been so thoroughly shaken by God's inexplicable action. These active ways of maintaining the social fabric are missing in Job's second response, perhaps in anticipation of what is to come. But within the parameters of the prologue, the potential force of Job's affliction is kept at bay and the surface of things remains intact. (Indeed, if Job's active response is missing the second time, the friends fully make up for it with their acts of mourning, worship and solidarity). But in chapter 3 this rift comes in all its force, and in such a manner that 'rift' is no longer really the appropriate word; better might be 'rupture' or 'explosion'. 12 But it is significant that this rupture has the form of a lack, a failure of conceptualization. This is captured in 3.25 in Job's reference to 'the fear', (pachad)^ that comes upon him, which functions as a sort of placeholder for that which has no name, but which Job simply indwells. Corresponding to the unconceptualized is Job's peculiar concentration on the day of his birth (3.3) and night of his conception (3.4): Job's pain stands ever present as the fraught background of this day and night, but never itself comes to the fore as the object of scrutiny or even curse. Rather, the day and night are 12. This transition is not to be conceived in any straightforwardly narrative fashion, contra HABEL, p. 106: 'An abrupt complication interrupts the narrative plot of Job's story.' CLINKS is nearer the mark: 'In this speech we are suddenly plunged out of the epic grandeur and deliberateness of the prologue into the dramatic turmoil of the poetry, from the external description of suffering to Job's inner experience' (p. 77). The poem shows us what 'persisting in integrity' (2.3), which the prologue could only set forth as a promise, really consists in.

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invoked as the matrix in which it has its shadowy existence and in which its force is unleashed. In other words, because it cannot be made sense of within the socio-symbolic universe, it cannot become the subject matter of explicative speech, but issues instead in a curse on the whole ordered world in which it does not fit, seeking its annihilation. It is an indescribable void at the centre of the curse, out of which the curse is uttered and into which everything is drawn. 13 In other words, this pain is Job's surplus animation which cannot be metabolized; the non-intentional kernel which remains beyond the meaningful socio-symbolic matrix, but which as such brings into question this matrix and its ultimate meaningfulness. If such a surplus is usually harnessed to reinforce this social order, there is a profound interruption of this normal functioning in Job's monologue. Instead, by giving it voice, Job simply releases the animation. And because it is not bound once more into the socio-symbolic order, it works itself out in another way. We see this outworking in the fact that the day of Job's curse is heightened and intensified throughout the monologue to include within its ambit the whole of creation. " Parallelism is the vehicle by which this is carried out, smuggling into apparent equivalences what are actually intensifications of the initial motif. ' This is evident not only in the progression of verbs ('claim' in v. 5a followed by 'cast terror' in v. 5c), but also in the way that a sequence of day, night, months and years is worked into the poem (v. 6b, c). The pitch is further increased in the invocation of mythological and cosmogonic imagery in v. 8, suggesting that 'the initial movement back in time [from the present to the day of Job's birth to the night of his conception] now reaches across aeons to the world's beginnings'. 17 Verse 9 forms a climax in which the longing even for the first signs of light in the world is defeated, leading to the pithy summary of v. 10: here, instead of the light that the newborn child would normally see, there is only Job's pain ( , Carnal). This substitution has by v. 20 become

13. In this sense. Job's curse can legitimately be described as an event (CLINES, p. 78). 'Such curses were considered automatic agents; their words were efficacious formulae and the power they summoned were released in the utterance of the formula ... By cursing his birth Job has therefore set in motion forces of destruction' (HABEL, p. 107). We will see below more precisely in what sense this is the case. 14. The magical terms in which e.g. HABEL has understood Job's curse are appropriate to the extent that the 'surplus animation' unleashed by Job is indeed a force genuinely to be reckoned with. 15. This is already implied, moreover, in the opening of the monologue in which 'Let there be darkness I )' (v. 4) reverses the word of creation, 'Let there be light i ) ' , in Gen. 1.3 (c'f. HABKL, p. 107). 16. Cf. R. Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (Edingburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), pp. 76-84, to which my analysis of this chapter is much indebted. 17. Alter, Poetry, p. 79.

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common currency: 'Why is light given to one in misery ( ), and life to the bitter in soul?' Job has become the general sufferer 18 and his day light. And it is this 'light' whose annihilation is invoked in a surging of darkness. Job's animation becomes this pressure towards annihilation because its nonrelationality, instead of being captured by the socio-symbolic system, brings the whole of this relational reality into question by relativizing it and rendering it meaningless. Not only is Job's existence made meaningless by his suffering, but this point of non-sense exposes the rot at the root of the sociosymbolic system as a whole. Its relativization is expressed in 3.13—19, in which death, as the great equalizer, flattens out all socio-symbolic distinctions. This equality is in some sense the very singularity that cannot be absorbed by the categories necessary for these distinctions. Thus, all creation is drawn into the orbit of the void of Job's singularity, the various aspects within it, ironically enumerated in 3.13—19, reduced to indices of Job's suffering. We are left with the now larger-than-life reality of Job in his attempted 'contraction of all creation to the point of extinction'.1 Although Job's pain remains the invisible force at the source of his speech rather than being focused upon within it, it does appear to come to the surface of this speech in the summary statement of 3.10, where the reason for the curse is given ( ): 'because it [the night] did not shut the doors of my mother's womb, and hide from my eyes.' It is this root, (^amal\ which reappears in 3.20 to denote the nature of Job's life as one of or misery (and life in general insofar as this has been drawn into the ambit of 20 Job's). This is a term common in Wisdom literature, but is particularly favoured by the author of Job, who harnesses its several connotations to serve the purposes of the book's peculiar conceptual framework. Its basic 18. The use of in v. 23 picks up on the same word used of Job in v. 3, suggesting that this generated third-person utterance is really a dramatic representation of Job's own predicament rather than a true recognition of other sufferers (cf. Alter, Poetry, p. 82; CLINES, p. 98). 19. Paraphrasing Alter, Poetry, p. 103. Zuckerman captures well the dynamic of Job's 'deathwish' in this opening monologue, and its incipient legal implications (Job the Silent, pp. 118135). First, in counterpoint to the standard genre of the 'righteous sufferer' (as examples of which Zuckerman gives Babylonian Theodicy, Babylonian Job and Sumerian Job), what Job seeks is precisely not restoration. For the problem goes deeper than this. In my own terms, Job's pain brings into question the whole socio-symbolic structure in which 'restoration' (e.g. a return to the state of the prologue) would have its meaning. Second, in counterpoint to the standard legal genre (which Zuckerman sees as evident in Jeremiah), (again in my terms) Job does not seek to be vindicated according to the law's own terms, for he is bringing this law itself into question (as fundamentally arbitrary). Thus, as Zuckerman says, 'Job is determined to stand his ground against his Deity, even if he must first retreat to Sheol in order to do so. Job's position is one of radical disjunction in which he would rather be a shade in the netherworld with his sense of justice intact than alive in this world grovelling before God, despite his innocence' (p. 126). His death-wish is the means by which he persists in his integrity. 20. CLINES regards this ( c f . i n 3.17, 26, which has a similar meaning) as the leitmotiv of the monologue (p. 98).

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meanings are labour' or 'toil' on the one hand (found most extensively in Ecclesiastes), and 'trouble' on the other. In both cases the Hebrew semantic principle that 'a word can be used to signify both an act or a quality and its consequence' applies. " Thus 'trouble' comes to mean both 'mischief and the trouble or misery thereby caused, and 'labour' also 'the fruit of labour', 23 hence 'wealth'. In the book of Job the basic meaning of 'trouble' predominates, and the different uses to which the word is put reveal the distinctive conceptions of Job and the friends. Being exactly congruent with the doctrine of retribution, the semantic principle is naturally exploited by the friends, who thereby make the doctrine appear a semantic necessity, e.g. 4.8: 'As I have seen, those who plough iniquity and sow trouble ( ; reap the same.' In this way, they place emphasis on the doing of evil by humans (cf. esp. 5.6—7, 15.35), ~ only once using in the sense of 'misery', i.e. trouble simply suffered (11.16). This, on the other hand, is the dominant meaning in Job's usage (3.10, 20; 7.3), which can also shade over into the sense of meaninglessness (7.3, where it is parallel with ^ and 16.2). However, insofar as is used to denote Job's pain, we must understand it precisely as a force which works. This suggests that the other valence of the term, toil, is still in play. Job's , in other words, is the surplus of non-intentional or meaningless activity at the heart of the sociosymboUc order, 6 which threatens the annihilation of creation. In this case,

21. See BDB, p. 765. The derivation of these meanings from their verbal root, which denotes 'to labour' or 'toil', 'often with an eye to its difficulty, its burdensome nature', is clear: an emphasis in the noun on the element of burden leads to its meaning as 'trouble, misery, adversity' (VANGEMKRKN, vol. 3, pp. 435-36). We find the two valences held together, for example, in the use of the noun to denote Israel's slave labour in Egypt (Deut. 26.7). 22. See GORDIS, p. 36. 23. VANGKMKRKN, vol. 3, p. 436; GORDIS, p. 36.

24. Which is not only a semantic necessity but a natural principle also. Cf. CLINKS, who comments on this verse: 'To transpose the language of natural law ('sow/reap') to the sphere of human morality and fortune is a confidence trick. It supposes a deterministic nexus between act and consequence' (p. 125). He goes on to note the dual significance of the nouns and as that which assists Eliphaz's thought here (p. 126). 25. Cf. CLINKS on 15.35: '[The] wicked gives birth to his own downfall' (p. 365). On 5.6-7 I follow CLINKS and GORDIS (contra POPE and HABKL), translating: 'For affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble ( ) sprout from the ground; it is man who begets trouble ( ), as the sparks fly upward.' This is to retain the negative sense of in v. 5a and revocalize in v. 5b to yield 'begets' instead of 'is born to', with the resultant sense that all suffering humans must undergo is begotten by themselves. 26. According to CLINKS, the trouble Job must behold 'is not an internal subjective "misery" (Gordis) or "sorrow" (JB) but an objective state of affairs that is burdensome and productive of grief (pp. 88-89). My interpretation, however, suggests that it is both objective (as the non-sense intrinsic to the wider socio-symbolic structure) and subjective (as the excitations this causes within Job himself). The objective side is beheld in Ps. 94.20-21 and Isa. 10.1, where the term is used to denote the structural oppression of the poor and innocent. This meaning, moreover, is very apt in relation to Job, who is exposed to the arbitrariness of the law.

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what the friends refer to as is the same surplus energy redirected towards a sustaining of the socio-symbolic order or doctrine of retribution.

4 Job's Response to the Friends: His Pain as God's Attack In the light of this, the friends' attempt to reinscribe Job within their accepted socio-symbolic framework can be seen for what it really is: the conventional work of in sustaining this socio-symbolic order, which Job's subverts. It is the construction of the fantasy of the all-encompassing principle 'trouble reaps trouble', into which is bound, in order to create a place 'outside' the world from which they can survey it and adapt themselves to it. This fantasy, in its reinforcement and even creation of the symbolic binary of the righteous and the wicked, serves as a defence against Job's enigmatic presence. In its transcendence and resistance of these symbols, the latter gives rise to the excitations by which the friends are summoned 'to engage in a repetitive and interminable citational praxis in relation to a source of authorization that is at some level grounded in itself.'" These excitations (which are indeed a kind of suffering for them), and the repetitive activity into which they are channelled, are the the friends must endure. This would account for their increasing vehemence in relation to Job and the growing offensiveness of their claims: such is the only way to endure Job's uncanny and disturbing presence. Their continual references to tradition (e.g. 8.8—10; 15.18—19) are defensive manoeuvres intended to impose a law on the unpredictable flow of Job's life and speech. It is in this way that their doctrine becomes ideology, setting tradition in a fundamentally hegemonic relation to life. After Eliphaz has spoken, Job's opening words focus directly on his suffering: 'O that my vexation were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances!' (6.2). The intensity that was directed in his opening monologue towards the curse and annihilation of creation is now channelled into this vehement expression of his pain, in preparation for his initial attempt to conceptualize it. But this in no way means that we are prepared for the content of this conceptualization: 'For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me' (6.4). That Job's sufferings are described as the direct workings of God, and in this shockingly physical manner, is a surprising and profoundly disturbing move on the part of Job. The vague and uncrystallized fear of 3.25 and the unspoken painful void behind Job's curse are suddenly condensed in this vivid portrayal of the Almighty: 27. Santner, Psychotheology, p. 50, in the context of a discussion of'symbolic investiture', which is the term Santner uses to describe practices in which an individual is endowed with a new social status or role, e.g. when she is pronounced wife, professor, judge etc. This involves not only the subject's endowment with new predicates, but also a citation of the authority that guarantees those predicates.

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A better attunement to what is going on in Job is gained if we take another look at the juxtaposition of Eliphaz's speech and Job's initial monologue. Job has spoken out of the silence from the depth of his pain in a sweeping annihilation of creation, leaving his own singularity as all that remains after the utter destruction of the meaning inherent in creation. Eliphaz then has the audacity to reconstruct this meaning and give it back to Job in order to soothe his out-of-jointness by investing him once more with a symbolic identity in which he can function normally. But Job is still marvelling at the tatters of meaning, and hence the thorough meaninglessness, of the world now strewn before him. He is therefore in no position to comprehend this orderly construal offered to him by Eliphaz, let alone to find himself in it. These symbols carry the 'tastelessness' of their ultimate foundationlessness and so are thoroughly indigestible for Job (cf. 6.6—7). With the crumbling of any meaning they may have had, their efficacy is experienced by Job not as symbolic investiture but as direct psychophysical assault. Eliphaz's words do not talk to Job's sense but pierce to his very self and wound this literally, cf. 19.2: 'How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words?' But because Eliphaz is himself already part of the debris of creation, with no meaningful identity left for Job, this wounding can only come from the One to whom this debris and the pain at its centre (Job) owe their existence. 5 Job's Bipolar Conception of Self Job's conception of his suffering as affliction directly from the hand of God has, in turn, ramifications for his conception of himself as the object of God's attack. Job begins to develop such a conception explicitly in 7.12ff., and a significant dimension of Job's side of the dialogue is then devoted to its development, reaching its climax in chapter 31, Job's legal declaration of his innocence. An increasing obsession with his innocence and integrity represents, however, only one pole of Job's self-conception. The movement begins with its counterpole: 'Am I the Sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me?' (7.12). As the object of God's attack, Job can only understand himself as the chaos God had to defeat in creating the world; as God's counterpart in the act of violence needed to establish order, ever after existing at the boundaries of this order, needing to be kept at bay. In this way, Job witnesses to the primordial 'exclusion' through which creation was constituted, and identifies himself with these origins. Eliphaz is therefore in no way wrong to impute to Job a claim to be 'the firstborn of the human race' (15.7a), alluding to the myth of the primordial man. And when he goes on to say, 'Were you brought forth before the hills?' (15.7b), he ironically pinpoints exactly Job's singularity in its existence 'beyond' and in some sense 'before' the social symbolic order, as that which exists at its origins and boundaries. This lends, furthermore, an ironic and surprising twist to the questions later to be hurled at Job out of the whirlwind: 'Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?' (38.4).

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However, this exalting of Job to primordial heights is experienced by him fundamentally as degradation. All the human dignity that was conferred on Job through the socio-symbolic order has been converted — by the releasing of its underlying animation, experienced now in abstraction as direct psychophysical assault — into the singling out of Job's humanity as an object of mockery and offence. This is brought out forcefully in 7.17f. in which Psalm 8, which wonders at God's gracious singling out of humanity, is twisted into horror at God's despising gaze which gratuitously makes humanity its mark: 'What is the human being, that you make so much of it, that you set your mind on it, visit it every morning, test it every moment?' (7.17—18).28 The generality of reference in the term 'human being' confirms the sense in which the whole of creation, having imploded into Job, is implicated in this meaningless and malevolent divine scrutiny: 'all meaningful relations among the regions of being have been effectively supplanted by external and nonsensical ones.' Job attempts in vain to make sense of God's gratuitous and arbitrary action: 'If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your mark? Why have I become a burden to you?' (7.20). But God, transmuted into the 'watcher of humanity', has left all sense behind. And Job, as the plaything of this capricious God, is inextricably implicated in his perversity: 'Though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse' (9.20b); 'he mocks at the calamity of the innocent' (9.23b); 'yet you will plunge me into filth, and my own clothes will abhor me' (9.31); 'for I am filled with disgrace' (10.15c); 'and he has shrivelled me up, which is a witness against me; my leanness has risen up against me, and testifies to my face. He has torn me in his wrath, and hated me' (16.8—9b); and 'If you [the friends] ... make my humiliation an argument against me, know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net around me' (19.5b-6). As the object of God's direct and violent manipulation, Job has been made wretched by God and has thus become repulsive to him. He exists at a point where he no longer has any meaning for God but is simply at the receiving end of God's arbitrary sovereign violence, exposed to the 'state of exception' in which the law, having lost its significance, nevertheless retains its validity and force. This is Job's humiliation. But not only is he humiliated, he is utterly terrified: 'For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors ( ) of God are arrayed against me' (6.4). The root (baaf) is characteristic of the book of Job,30 being used by Job, for example, in 7.14, 9.34 and 13.21, 28. Cf. Dell, who offers this as an example of Job's parody of the Psalmic hymn form (Job as Sceptical Literature, pp. 126-27). 29. Santner, Psychotheology, pp. 54—55, in a description of the breakdown of the Supreme Court judge, D.P. Schreber, which had resulted from an impasse in the normal functioning of symbolic investiture. 30. A high percentage of its occurrences in the Hebrew Bible (in all derivative forms) are in the book of Job (cf. VANGEMEREN, vol. 1, p. 692). Apart from its usage in 6.4, the plural noun appears only in Ps. 88.17. The intensive form occurs 8 times out of 13 in the book of Job (ROWLEY, p. 68).

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and by the friends (to characterize the fate of the wicked) in 15.24 and 18.11. We can expect it, therefore, to express something fundamental about the nature of Job's t his being made wretched by God. Wolfers notes the extent to which Job characterizes his state of suffering in terms of fear (using a whole host of terms), and remarks upon the oddity of the natural reference implicit in this, when it would seem that Job has nothing more to lose. He explains this on the basis of his allegorical interpretation, in which the disaster Job awaits is not a personal one at all, but the final destruction that is to fall on the people of Judah, the only surviving remnant of Israel, whom Job represents/ However, this is somewhat reductive, missing an important nuance of the root This denotes not so much a concrete, well-defined fear, but rather an overwhelming terror:" e.g. the terror awakened by a powerful individual (Est. 7.6) or by a numinous being (1 Sam. 16.14—15); terror before God's judgment (Isa. 21.4); terror before a life-threatening situation in face of which one is absolutely powerless (Ps. 18.4[5]). VanGemeren aptly sums it up as ca response to something not fully understood and overwhelmingly powerful.'' ^ But is this not precisely what God's enigmatic and violent presence is for Job? Apart from Job 6.4, the only other occurrence of the plural noun in Ps. 88.16[17] denotes the hypostasized fear that precedes Yahweh/ This is for Job the surplus animation, the arbitrary violence at the base of the law (captured well in the 'arrows' of 6.4), which is precisely God's overwhelming power to judge Job without being called to account, meaning that Job is totally at God's mercy — the object of his manipulation. But as such, some of the futural connotation is preserved: having become the object of God's manipulation, it is now that Job is most vulnerable. Within the security of the socio-symbolic system, Job was protected by the filters of his symbolic identity against the possibility of direct exploitation. It is only with the collapse of this and exposure to the arbitrary violence of the law that he has become an object of possible humiliation. Therefore, this humiliation is not something of the past, but rather something that God can only now exploit, with the added prospect that he will do so continually and with greater and greater violence (10.16-17). Indeed, this increasing violence is brought to expression in the increasing intensity with which Job depicts God's actions against him, beginning in 6.4f., and continuing more graphically in 13.24f, in 16.6—17, and reaching a climax in chapter 19:

31. Deep Things, pp. 97-100. 32. The intensive form of the verb also having the possible meanings of 'to overwhelm', 'to assail' (BOB, pp. 129-30; VANGEMEREN, vol. 1, p. 692). 33. VANGEMEREN, vol. 1, p. 692.

34. In conjunction with HABEL, p. 145.

, the 'ominous terror' of God (v. 15[16], cf. Job 9.34; 13.21). Cf.

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He has walled up my way so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. He has stripped my glory from me, and taken the crown from my head. He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, he has uprooted my hope like a tree. He has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his adversary. His troops come on together; they have thrown up siegeworks against me, and encamp around my tent. (19.8—12) This battle imagery, picking up on the images of oppression in 6.23, does not only have significance on the literal historico-political level (contra Wolfers), for, as we have seen, the whole creation is implicated in Job's suffering, as that which has become non-sensical. And this causes Job to experience all external remnants of the socio-political order as his literal oppressors in the psychophysical manner described above. Further, the fluidity with which Job moves from reference to God to reference to his human adversaries (e.g. 16.9—11) is a consequence of the fact that the latter no longer have any identity in their own right, and that it is ultimately God who exists behind all that Job experiences, as Job's only remaining Other — even if this Other is constituted simply by arbitrary violence. However, this is only one pole of Job's self-conception as the object of God's attack. The other is already implied as the language of attack and humiliation slides into that of the imputation of iniquity (first in 7.20—21), i.e. as Job's wretchedness before God becomes inextricable from his condemnation by God. This latter connotation becomes more and more prevalent as Job fixes his concentration on God as the arbitrary founder of the law (cf. chapter 9), around which a whole legal discourse accumulates, becoming a fictional trial of Job against God which culminates in Job's final challenge in chapter 31. In so framing his wretchedness before God as his condemnation, Job comes to perceive his singularity as his very innocence or integrity ( , tummati), indeed as the only nub of integrity that remains: 'Though I were righteous, my own mouth would condemn me; I am perfect tam)\ and he declares me crooked! I am perfect ( j; I do not know myself; I loathe my life' (9.20—21). ~ For in his accusation of Job — in its meaninglessness, arbitrariness and injustice — God cannot be called to account (9.2—4, 13—22, 28-35; 10.14-17; 19.6). But this is a perverse denial, not only of Job's integrity, but of his very dignity and freedom. It is in confrontation with this total perversion and denial of justice that Job, paradoxically, reaches a perception of his integrity, and against it that he cries out 'Violence!', finally concluding, 'there is no justice' (19.7). Thus Job's integrity is maintained in 35. For a detailed analysis of Job's discovery of his 143-49 (esp. pp. 146f£).

, see Chapter 6, 'Job's Mock Trial', pp.

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relation to, and in defiance of, the rottenness of the law. This counterpole to his condemnation by God increases, therefore, in parallel intensity to his portrayal of the latter (e.g. in 13.13-23; 16.16-22; 19.23-29; 27.2-6, and in climactic elaboration and intensification in chapter 31). Thus in a fundamental way, Job experiences himself simultaneously as wretched, disgraceful, scandalous, and even steeped in iniquity on the one hand, and innocent, righteous and worthy of vindication on the other. 6a This dual perception comes to its most pithy and developed expression in 27'.2—1: 'As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter ... my lips will not speak falsehood, and my tongue will not utter deceit ... until 1 die I will not put away my integrity i from me. I hold fast my righteousness, and will not let it go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days' (27.2, 4, 5b-6). In this, Job's exposure to the sovereign exception, his being made wretched by God, becomes one with his unrelenting persistence in his own integrity. In other words, his experience of wretchedness becomes at its deepest point the very certainty of this integrity. This white-hot point of intensity is what produces the momentum that finally results in Job's challenge hurled at the impenetrable force at the base of the law in chapter 31. In preparation for this Job sets out in chapters 29 and 30 first his righteous character as this was esteemed in his former days, and then his present wretchedness as one who has been afflicted by God. Not only does this powerfully portray the momentous reversal that has taken place, thereby witnessing to the violent and arbitrary ways of God; it gives expression, in narrative form, to the juxtaposition within Job of wretchedness and integrity. The hyperbole involved is not a matter of Job's idealized memory of his past, nor simply for the sake of dramatization, but is the only way Job can put into words the integrity he has beyond all sociosymbolic definitions of it, and the extent of the perversity of the reversal, which not only condemns Job illegally, but in doing so, excludes him from the law itself. The descriptions of chapters 29 and 30 serve, therefore, to unpack the pithy statement of 27'.2—7', and thereby to lay down the grounds of his challenge in chapter 31, in which Job hurls the reversal witnessed in chapters 29-30 back at God. What emerges overall is a development from the embryo of Job's monologue, which gives expression to the unconceptualized pain of his singularity, to the declaration of 27.2—6, its unpacking in chapters 29 and 30, and the challenge of chapter 31, in which this singularity is construed as an integrity worthy of legal vindication. Job reaches this point by way of a deeper and deeper probing of his singularity; carried out by means of its dialectical construal as both wretched and innocent in relation to its hostile and arbitrary Other. In this way, Job's persistent verbal searching is ultimately a movement 36. 'He, the man who plumbs his own worthlessness, also maintains his integrity and sustains this cosmic drama. So, like a root in its growth, he shows at once inward probing and outward thrust 1 (Cook, The Roof, p. 19).

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deeper and deeper into himself, even if always accompanied by an experience and conceptualization of the Other. What Job accomplishes, in other words, is a kind of self-examination:1 Indeed, if Job's successive speeches are basically commentary on his first monologue, which is the outcry of his singular self, and if the whole dialogue (including the Whirlwind speeches?) emerges out of this first monologue, which contains the whole in embryonic form, then the dialogue must be understood as an exploration of this self.3 6 Job's Other However, this movement inwards does not occur within a void. It can only happen in correlation with Job's conceptualization of the Other. As we have seen, Job's experience of his own wretchedness and condemnation arises out of his experience and construal of God as enemy — as the arbitrary and violent founder of the law. But I have not yet begun to draw out the other pole of Job's relation to God, which correlates with Job's recognition of his integrity. This first emerges in an incontrovertible way in 16.18f, where Job's knowledge of his innocence becomes a cry for vindication. This cry, as an invocation, cannot be contemplated without the conviction of the presence of one who can be invoked against the violence and arbitrariness of God. And this conviction gains the following form: 'Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high' (16.19). The lawless one against whom Job is railing is here conceived as one who is ultimately righteous. This conception becomes possible, and indeed necessary, in the context of the inextricability of Job's wretchedness and integrity and the intensity of the dialectic this involves. For this dialectic can only exist in correlation with the equally intense dialectic of God as enemy and friend (cf. 27.2, in which Job swears by the same God who has put him in the wrong): just as Job's wretchedness is the result of his manipulation by an Other, so his integrity can only ultimately be received from another (recalling that my singularity, or internal otherness, is the excitation caused in me by the enigmatic messages of the other and my attempted interpretation of these messages). But as we have seen, there is only one true Other in Job's reconstruction of reality, and thus the one who is the manipulator of Job's very psychophysical being must also ultimately be acknowledged as the one from whom Job receives his integrity, i.e. as his vindicator. The second point at which this acknowledgment surfaces is in 19.23f, in which Job goes even further in his development of this vision of his Other: Tor I know that my Vindicator lives, and that at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall behold God, whom I shall behold on my side, and 37. As anticipated in Chapter 2. 38. I do not intend this in a reductive way. Wolfers's historico-political reading, for instance, witnesses to very different possibilities within the text.

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my eyes shall see to be unestranged. My heart faints within me' (19.25—27). It is this conviction, it would seem, that ultimately calls forth Job's final challenge, which would otherwise be uttered in the void, with no hope of a final destination.39 Job's ^^-exploration, therefore, is inextricable from his relation to an Other. His conceptualization of this Other is, on the one hand, what leads him towards a greater awareness of his internal otherness, but on the other hand, it is a probing of this internal otherness that brings about his discovery and reconstrual of the enigmatic presence of the 'external' Other. By searching within, he knocks up against this Other who is already there in the depths of his self. This inextricability of internal and external otherness is something we will see much more vividly in the Whirlwind speeches. But who, or what exactly, is this Other? I have up to now been assuming that this Other for Job is ultimately God, but this assumption was guided by Job's own conceptualization of his experiences and his conviction throughout that in his sufferings the one with whom he had to do was God — holding onto God in this form to the bitter end. But even if there is ultimately a sense in which God is Job's true Other, we must not jump to this equation prematurely. There is an intermediate sense in which it is not simply a matter of God. This would be to settle with the easy and reductionist equation of God with the form in which he appears to Job. Even if God really does take this form (and even this is not self-evident), we are already pointed beyond this equation by the fact that God takes several forms in relation to Job. This dialectic cannot be collapsed. Job's conception of God as enemy is inextricably bound up with his construal of his affliction as a curse of the Deuteronomic Covenant, indeed as the breaking of this Covenant. This becomes evident when Job develops this construal in legal terms, where the question of God's justice becomes pivotal. His accusations of arbitrariness and injustice on the part of God derive their sense from the covenantal framework: God's arbitrariness is the non-sense at the base of the covenantal law, which condemns Job to a punishment which no longer signifies his wickedness. In other words, Job's conceptualization of God only takes place within a system of filters. This may be equated with the living tradition in which Job receives the Covenant. If God is Job's ultimate Other, this is only the case insofar as Job relates to God through the matrix of his tradition, and thus first and foremost to this tradition as his Other. However, this tradition is not to be reduced to its various formulations, i.e. to its socio-symbolic dimension. It would then be just as discardable as any of its formulations, suffering the fate these do in Job's contraction of creation to the point of extinction. Rather, it is the enigmatic messages of the tradition 39. This identification of the redeemer-figures mentioned in these passages with God is controversial. For a more detailed argument which considers the various exegetical factors, see Chapter 5, 'God as pp. 131—35.

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itself that Job is wrestling with even in this destructive manoeuvre. On the one hand, it is the tradition that presents Job with the aporias that he must conceptually work through, i.e. which suffers from a surplus of validity over meaning. But on the other hand, it is the tradition which contains within it the resources, not to overcome these aporias exactly, but to release them from their paralysing effect. Therefore, the fact that the covenantal law — in its ultimate groundlessness perpetuated by what can only be an act of violence — fundamentally undermines itself, should not lead to a disillusionment with it or the tradition which embodies it, but should rather be the very fact which points to the 'more' (or remainder) of the Covenant and its tradition of reception. This 'more' can only be found in wrestling, as Job does, with the maddening and painful aporia of the law and so of the tradition. If there were no more to the tradition than its translation into the code of the law, this wrestling would come to nothing. This is the test set up by the prologue — and insofar as the 'more' of the tradition might in the end be inseparable from the Other of God (in which case Job would be profoundly right to perceive God in the form of his suffering), this may indeed turn out to be a test of God. Equally, however, if there were no translation of tradition into the code of law (i.e. no socio-symbolic dimension to it), there would be no access to its 'more'. This 'more' really is a 'remainder' in the sense that it is meaningful only in relation to that from which it remains. In other words, it really is the 'more' of this tradition and cannot be separated from this contextualization and embodiment. Thus it is crucial that Job can only relate to God through the brokenness of the tradition — encountering the Other of God through and within the Other of the tradition. The resources for this relation are continually to be found already within the tradition (even if it must undergo new readings for these resources to come to light). This is only another way of saying what has already been said of the transformation from prologue to epilogue: that a critique of the Deuteronomic Covenant does not imply a jumping out of it but rather a transcendence within it. What this transcendence constitutes, and hence the nature of the 'remainder', is part of the burden of the poem to discover and explicate more fully. We have come some way in following the poem in its exploration, but before considering the Whirlwind speeches we can only attain to a delimiting understanding of this remainder: as surplus animation within the depths of the person, corresponding to a surplus of validity over meaning within the law. If we have seen how this can be released and reharnessed in a movement of self-examination in dialectical relation to God, we have not yet seen what this dialectic really signifies, nor indeed whether it is a fruitful dialectic. 7 Concluding Remarks Nevertheless, having come this far towards an understanding of what remains once the Covenant has been 'broken', we may make a few remarks.

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First, this exploration sheds, yet again, retrospective light on the prologue. We discovered earlier Job's relation to God in the prologue to be permeated, at least on its contractual level, by a fear of God's breaking the Covenant. But we left the question of its rationale unanswered. When there was always already more to the Covenant than this, why did the possibility of its breach constitute such a threat? In other words, what was it that caused Job to hold so tightly onto his Covenant with God at the level of reciprocal actions, i.e. to shoulder the responsibility of both his own relationship to God and that of his family, holding this structure of living 'continually' intact? The answer lies in the fact that the 'more' of the Covenant is a somewhat ambivalent entity. If we have discovered a positive significance of this 'more', i.e. Job's integrity, and what will perhaps turn out to be its fruitful harnessing in a probing of this integrity; this significance is undetectable from the perspective of the socio-symbolic system, in which Job is firmly rooted in the prologue. Indeed, in its relation to the latter this 'more' is fundamentally a threat — the threat of ungroundedness and violence at its base. This surplus animation is as such the true object of fear - that against which the contractual dimension of the Covenant defends. In this defence, it is harnessed in such a way as to reinforce the system. This is exactly what the friends do — but also, as we have indeed suggested earlier, what Job does in the prologue. Such an understanding sheds a new light on Job's 'continual' action. This is none other than the repeated citation of the authority of the self-grounding law or socio-symbolic system. In other words, Job's clinging onto the contractual Covenant is fuelled precisely by the 'more' of the Covenant, for the fear that pervades the prologue is a fear of just this 'more'. The latter, then, rather than being the reason not to be threatened by a 'breach' of the Covenant, itself constitutes precisely this threat. Second, before moving on to a consideration of the Whirlwind speeches, it is worth considering in the light of the above the different ways in which Job and the friends relate to their tradition, and what this provisionally implies for a concept of obedience, or rather a 'for naught' relation to God. In closing their eyes to the sovereign exception, or arbitrary violence at the base of the law, the friends are effectively able to systematize this law without remainder in the doctrine of retribution. The latter serves as a fantasy by which they defend themselves against this arbitrary violence and its correlate in Job's singularity. For it gives them an absolute perspective, or place 'outside' the world, from which they can survey the world as circumscribed by this system. But as such, they 'achieve' mastery over it, and thus also — most significantly — over God's sovereignty, since this has been reduced to its expression in the doctrine of retribution. Or rather, they have put themselves in the place of God's sovereignty at the base of the system, and have thus become their own judges, taking God's judgment into their own hands. Paradoxically, however, this equation between God's sovereignty and the code of law also means placing themselves under the law as a directly prescriptive entity — an external criterion to which they can appeal. This is a fundamentally heteronomous

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relation which construes God as 'over against' not in terms of transcendence (which would also imply immanence) but rather in terms of oppositional coordination. Job, on the other hand, exposes the sovereign exception and hence the inconsistency within the tradition itself, which as such can no longer be equated directly with God's sovereignty and hence remain unproblematically prescriptive. In other words, he must take up a fundamentally questioning 40 stance in relation to it, drawing upon its resources only in full acknowledgment of its brokenness. But this means that it can no longer function as an external criterion and final court of appeal. Rather, his relation to it must take the form of a wrestling with its enigmatic messages, in recognition of the remainder they imply. But in the disintegration of the heteronomous relation, such a wrestling can only take place within Job himself, the tradition being conceived as immanent to him rather than held at a distance. There is, as it were, no place outside himself to which he can appeal for answers i.e. in the light of which he can abdicate responsibility. His wrestling can therefore only take the form of a self-scrutiny, as provoked by the enigmatic messages of the tradition, and thus always in the light of this Other. Such wrestling, in a movement of self-examination, should lead to the God who is truly transcendent, because also immanent, i.e. the Other who is inextricable from our internal otherness. This may be, then, what constitutes a real preparation for the judgment of God, and thus a life lived continually in the acknowledgment of our responsibility before this ever-present judgment 41 of God. In Joban terms, could this self-scrutiny be the form of Job's truly 'for naught' relation to God?

40. And as we have already seen, but will see even more forcefully in the next chapter, this entails a fundamentally questioning stance in relation to God himself, raising questions about the nature of God's authority. 41. Cf. Barth, CD II.2, pp. 631-61.

II. The Whirlwind Speeches Encountering Creation When what is centrally at stake in the book of Job is understood to be the problem of unjust suffering, the Whirlwind speeches are expected to provide an answer to this problem. But when the stakes are shifted onto the problem of sanctiftcation, as in my analysis, our expectation in regard to the Whirlwind speeches also shifts. The question addressed to them is not so much 'What kind of solution are they?' but rather 'Where do they come from?' and 'How is Job transformed?' We have been following Job's development through the dialogue towards its culmination in Job's declaration of innocence in chapter 31, in which he finally hurls his challenge at God. This expresses the insight Job has reached into his singularity, that it has the character of integrity. From chapter 3 on (Job's first monologue), we have been living and moving inside Job's own reality, which from the point of view of his inward-directed search is the whole of reality. The Whirlwind speeches, then, even though they overtly respond to Job's challenge of God in chapter 31, constitute a massive 1. Whatever form this answer may take, even if this be a 'lack of answer' (cf. Dermot Cox, The Triumph of Impotence. Job and the Tradition of the Absurd, Rome: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1978, pp. 159-60). Cf. GORDIS: 'The natural world, though it is beyond man's ken, reveals to him its beauty and order. It is therefore reasonable for man to believe that the universe also exhibits a moral order with pattern and meaning, though it be beyond man's power fully to comprehend' (p. 435). And ROWIJ>Y: '[God intervenes], not to solve the intellectual problem, which had been the subject of the debate between Job and his friends, but to resolve the spiritual problem which lay behind the arguments on both sides ... The effect of the Divine speeches was to make Job conscious that . . . in his suffering, even though he could not know its cause, he might yet have the presence of God . . . and that he is wiser to bow humbly before God than to judge him' (p. 241). But is not Job's problem precisely this 'presence of God' in an alien form? 2. In viewing the Whirlwind speeches as an answer to the questions raised by the dialogue, HABKL is forced to look for 'points at which ironic allusions and indirect answers to Job's charges and complaints are made' (p. 533). In focusing on the question of how Job is transformed, by contrast, 1 will interpret these verbal links and allusions, not in terms of answer^ but in terms of reconfiguration. Alter comes much closer to this in his understanding of the Whirlwind speeches as the 'climactic development of images, ideas, and themes that appear in different and sometimes antithetical contexts earlier in the poetic argument' (Poetry, p. 87). However, he still seeks to distinguish the Whirlwind speeches from the rest of the poem as that which trumps it. Thus, 'through the pushing of poetic expression toward its upper limits, the concluding speech helps us see the panorama of creation, as perhaps we could do only through poetry, with the eyes of God' (p. 87). In other words, he wishes to elevate it above the rest as a kind of 'revelation' (p. 87).

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and unexpected interruption of this reality from beyond it. This voice from elsewhere is, from within Job's world, a total surprise. Hence the question that immediately arises: 'Where has it come from?'; and following on from this: 'How does it transform Job's world?' Although these questions arise out of an apparent discontinuity, they implicitly assume continuity. Such continuity is looked for both in the origins of the Whirlwind speeches — which are assumed not to have dropped down from heaven — and in the transformation they bring about, which (however radical) cannot, by virtue of being a transformation, consist in a total break with what was there before, but must be understood to occur to some extent in continuity with the transformation occurring within the dialogue. This is to view them, in whatever way, as a culmination of the development within the dialogue, and not as a response from elsewhere which miraculously deals with the otherwise intractable aporias of the dialogue. This certainly lessens the burden of meaning laid on the Whirlwind speeches (and the disappointment that frequently accompanies this heightened expectation^, but at the same time it should not undermine their significance as the climax and culmination of Job's transformation, and the discontinuity this does indeed involve.

1 The Whirlwind Speeches as a Reconfiguration and Reversal of Chapter 3 Continuity on a literary level is found in what turns out to be a far-reaching verbal connection between the Whirlwind speeches and chapter 3. As we will discover, the Whirlwind speeches take up many of the images in chapter 3, combining and adapting them in new ways. This would suggest that the seed out of which they grow is to be found as early on as chapter 3. In an examination of the nature of the reconfiguration they accomplish, furthermore, we may learn something of the transformation they bring about. We are alerted to this connection in the very first verses of chapter 38 (w. 2-3): Who is this that darkens ( ) counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man ( ), I will question you, and you shall declare to me. 3. Which is in large measure due to the fact that the speeches are placed in the mouth of God. Cf. Alter's appeal to 'revelation' (Poetry, p. 87). But what this really means — that God 'speaks' — is not often examined or even asked. This is by no means an unproblematic question, and I will not attempt to address it explicitly here. However, I will offer in the penultimate chapter an account of God's place within Job's journey of discovery (pp. 174— 179). 4. The exegesis that follows is much indebted to Alter's intricate and masterly poetic analysis of these chapters in Poetry, pp. 85—110.

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The use of the root (chashak, 'grow dark', v. 2a) harks back to its several occurrences in chapter 3, in which Job attempts to extinguish the light of existence by conjuring up darkness. And God's summons to Job to be like a man i , v. 3a) recalls the joyful announcement of the birth of Job, a manchild ( ), in 3.3. ^Let the day perish wherein I was born ( ), and the night which said, 'A man-child ( ) is conceived.' 4Let that day be darkness ( )! May God above not seek it, nor light shine upon it. " Let gloom ) and deep darkness ( ) claim it. Let clouds v ) dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it ( ). 'That night — let thick darkness ( ) seize it! let it not rejoice among the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. 7 Yea, let that night be barren; let no joyful cry be heard in it. 8 Let those curse it who curse the day, who are skilled to rouse up Leviathan. 9 Let the stars of its dawn be dark let it hope for light but have none, nor see the eyelids of the dawn 10 °because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb f]£DD TITH), nor hide trouble from my eyes. (3.3—10)

These turn out to be the first of many links between these chapters. 38.19— 20 takes up Job's fundamental opposition between light and darkness, questioning whether he really has the discernment required to order these unfathomable entities: 19

Where is the way to the dwelling of light , and where is the place of darkness 20 That you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home?

Job's permutation of this binary was geared towards the engulfing of light by darkness, tuning the lights of creation out one by one until all signs of existence had vanished. The Whirlwind speeches have implicitly brought into question this contraction of reality in the immediately preceding verses, which take up and convert the 'deep darkness ( tsalmamfy Job had invoked to claim his existence (cf. 3.5): 16 6

Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? 17 1 Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness (

)?

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18

Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.

Being placed in parallel with the recesses of the deep in v. 16 and the expanse of the earth in v. 18, deep darkness comes to represent the very extent of reality in one of its dimensions — which Job has not begun to plumb. It is therefore readapted to conjure up the expansion of reality in place of its contraction in chapter 3. In all this there is the intimation of a greater resistance and recalcitrance to reality than is admitted in chapter 3 in its alltoo-easy attempt to annihilate it. Light and darkness are not so easy to wield, and there is a sense that here in the Whirlwind speeches the forces of reality are fighting back against the contraction they were made to endure, emerging out of this in their independence and ungraspability. That the forces at play in God's speech out of the whirlwind ^ ) are the same forces that were involved in Job's pain and inner turmoil, emerging here in a new, resilient and expansive form, is suggested by Job's description of his affliction in 9.17 in 5 terms of a 'whirlwind x )' from God. This resilience and overflow of reality is attested in the fundamental conditions of creation: 4 Where 7

were you when I laid the foundation of the earth ... When the morning stars i ) sang together ( and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

),

12

"Have you commanded the morning ( ) since your days began, and caused the dawn ( ) to know its place, 13 that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? (38.4—13)

The sons of God in v. 7b recall the celestial court which participated in the divine decision to create humanity in Gen. 1.26,' the act of creation which is reversed in chapter 3. In reinstituting this act of creation, the Whirlwind speeches reverse the reversal. The morning stars of v. 7a i ), recalling the stars of Job's dawn ) in 3.9, reassert themselves against Job's attempt to expunge even their hope of light. Their singing (or cries of joy, ) breaks forth from its smothering in 3.7b ( , from the same root), and the sons of God shout for joy at the birth of creation, repeating on a grander scale the cry Job attempted to silence in 3.3. Furthermore, the stars of 3.9, recalled in 38.7, later become the constellations of 38.31—33, in an expansion which also entails particularization. It is in their particularity, then, that these stars resist their contraction in chapter 3. In this reinstitution of creation, finally, morning once more gains the upper hand (38.12—13), continually trumping the darkness as a sign of the establishment, maintenance and abundance of life. Its keeping of order in 5. Cf. GOOD, p. 339, who also picks up on this connection. 6. HABEL, p. 538.

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creation is expressed most vividly in v. 13 as its shaking of the wicked out of the earth. As one of the primordial, founding and constituent forces of reality, it is too fundamental to be contracted into the dawn of Job's limited existence and extinguished with it. Indeed, the 'eyelids of the dawn', which Job hoped to ward off (3.9), reappear with a vengeance later in 41.18 as a description of Leviathan, the most horrific and recalcitrant reality of all, who makes a mockery of Job's ineffectual attempt at its annihilation. But what is the nature of this emergent ungraspable reality? It appears not to be simply an uncontrollable breaking forth of energy in chaotic expansion. There is something more subtle about the play of forces in this outburst. 7 This has already been intimated, first in the continued existence of the binary light/darkness (38.19—21), where a certain balance must obtain, and second in the role of the dawn, which is commanded to take up a particular place (38.12b), and only as such to dispense with the wicked (38.13-15). The complexity of this interweaving of forces becomes more fully and clearly manifest, however, in the ordered interplay of the cluster of images in 38.8— 11 (the intervening verses of the section we have just considered), which again cleverly recombine and permute images from chapter 3: 8

Or who shut in ( ) the sea with doors when it burst forth i ) from the womb ; 9 when I made clouds ) its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, 10 and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors , 11 and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed'?

First, the cloud, which Job invoked in league with darkness to expunge his day (3.5), becomes, in parallel with the 'swaddling bands' of the sea, a procreational and nurturing image (v. 9a), being brought into harmony with the womb of v. 8b, which is freed once more to play its life-giving role. In chapter 3, by contrast, the cloud smothered that which had come forth from the womb (Job's day) in an annihilating act of reversal. Job's desire to remain within the womb , beten, 3.10) then slid seamlessly into a desire for the grave, the equivalence of womb and tomb becoming all but explicit: Tor then I should have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then I should have been at rest' (3.13). The womb thus figured as the place of nonexistence, or alternatively as that which gives birth to non-existence: 'Why did I not die at birth i , merechem, lit. from the womb), come forth from the womb ) and expire?' (3.11). In 38.8—11, by contrast, the womb has been reworked into an image of'the primordial abyss of water (Gen. 7.11) ... from which the sea issued at creation (Isa. 51.10).' That Job's curse was 7. Cf. GOOD, who notes the interplay of order and disorder in the world Yahweh portrays (pp. 346-48). 8. GORDIS, p. 444, who notes the appropriateness of the root , which expresses simultaneously the 'bursting forth of water', 'the rushing forth into battle', and 'the breaking forth from the womb'.

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indeed of cosmic dimensions is confirmed by its reversal here at the cosmic level, the womb of oblivion being converted into the womb of the waters that gushed forth at creation. There is another figure complicating this interplay: the doors, (cf 3.10a). In both speeches this is clearly a limiting force, but its role is subtly changed through a transformation in its relation to the womb. In 3.10 it figures as 'the doors of my mother's womb', and in this direct combination with 'womb' its force can only be put to the unambiguous use of preventing life. But in 38.8 (cf. 38.10) the doors are dissociated from the womb as the force which delimits the life that has already burst forth from it. This dissociation creates precisely the space in which life can flourish, as neither extinct nor overwhelming. Thus, both cloud and doors retain a sense of limiting, but a limiting of life for the purpose of its flourishing, rather than the holding back and smothering of this life altogether. There does, then, remain a certain tension within the new interplay of forces in 38.8—11, one which is necessary to hold in delicate balance the forces that allow life to exist. This is further confirmed by the reworking of the verb 'to hedge in/cover' ( ) in 38.8a. Job used this in 3.23 entirely negatively ('covering' both in the sense of 'concealing', and in the sense of 'trapping' him in his suffering existence): 'Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, whom God has hedged in?' In 38.8, however, although the negative sense of 'shutting in' is still present, its association with the procreational images that follow give a positive slant, bringing the word back into connection with its more usual meaning, a protective act of shading or sheltering (cf. Ps. 139.13, in which the association with procreation and nurture is fully present). Alter aptly sums up the picture resulting from this recombining of elements as follows: 'The doors are closed and bolted (verse 10) so that the flood will not engulf the earth, but nevertheless the waves surge, the womb of all things pulsates, something is born.' Involved in this is 'a virtual oxymoron, expressing a paradoxical feeling that God's creation involves a necessary holding in check of destructive forces and a sustaining of those same forces because they are also forces of life.' However, it is possible to be even more specific about the nature of the interplay of forces at work in these speeches. As we have seen, the ordering of creation is the work of God's command 38.12); and the way in which it is ordered is in the maintaining of the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, who are shaken out of the earth. Even at this most fundamental level, in other words, God's relation with creation is covenantal, and the order imposed is that of the law. This is confirmed by the use of the word (chuq) in 38.10 to describe the bounds of the sea. For this word can also mean 'statute', a connotation which is brought out explicitly in the next verse in which God addresses an edict to the sea. In this portrayal, the governing forces of the cosmos are God's 9. Alter, Poetry, pp. 99-100. 10. As HABEL also notes (p. 539).

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statutes. Just as the images of 'cloud', 'doors' and 'hedging in' are rescued from their debilitating connotations in Job's vision, being reworked in a more positive manner, so does the use of pick up on and transform analogously Job's usage of it in 14.5—6: 'Since his days are determined, and the number of his months is with you, and you have appointed his bounds ( ) that he cannot pass, look away from him, and desist, that he may enjoy, like a hireling, his day.' However, that God's relation to creation has a covenantal shape by no means implies that it is humanly comprehensible, amenable to the human structures of the law. Rather than reducing creation to the code of the law, the Whirlwind speeches show that the Covenant transcends its translation into this code, existing on as fundamental a level as this ascendancy of life. We see this even more emphatically in the continuation of the speech, when reality is not only shown to burst forth from the womb into which )ob had attempted to lock it, but to defy even the possibility that its origins could have been the womb (38.28-29): 28

Has the rain a father, or who has begotten ( "From whose womb and who has given birth

) the drops of dew? ) did the ice come forth , ) to the hoarfrost of heaven?

Procreational imagery is drawn upon here in order to be subverted, job had lamented, 'Why did I not die at birth i , come forth from the womb and expire?' (3.11). But the ironic questions of 38.28—29 demonstrate that the concept of 'coming forth from the womb' simply cannot be applied to the rain, ice or hoarfrost. Hence their dying and expiring can make no sense either. Thus, when Job asks that the day of his birth perish (3.3), in an act of reversal which shuts reality back in the womb 3.10), the reference of his speech extends little further than his own human reality, failing to capture in the limits of his day the light of creation in its entire extent, to which the Whirlwind speeches powerfully witness. Furthermore, not only did Job attempt to contract reality in its spatial dimensions, he also strove to telescope time into the limited time-span of the night of his conception, and then expunge it from the number of months: 'That night — let thick darkness seize it! Let it not rejoice among the days of the year, let it not come into the number of months ' (3.6). In response to this, Job is asked: 1

Do you know when the mountain goats give birth ? Do you observe the calving of the hinds? "Can you number the months that they fulfil, and do you know the time when they give birth , 11. Cf. Alter, Poetry, p. 101.

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"\vhen they crouch to give birth to their offspring and are delivered of their young? (39.1-3)

,

Again through the use of procreational language, time is refigured so as to become the principle of generation and renewal. Here, however, transcendence of the womb of Job's existence is achieved not through subversion but through an incommensurability of timescale, showing Job's horizons to have been limited to human time. Such transcendence of Job's human world is witnessed and celebrated even more profusely in the zoological section of the Whirlwind speeches. If Job perceived the elements of external creation merely as indices and reflectors of his own suffering, they are evoked in this section for their own sake in a detailed and dazzling portrayal of their peculiar characteristics.1" Job is only able to maintain his limiting perception because he conceives of each element in terms of its socio-symbolic function, classifiable within a matrix of binary oppositions (3.14—19): 13 " For 14

then 1 should have lain down . . . with kings and counsellors of the earth who rebuilt ruins for themselves, 15 " or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver. 17

'There the wicked cease from troubling , and there the weary are at rest. 18 There the prisoners are at ease together; they hear not the voice of the taskmaster 19 19 The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master.

But the Whirlwind speeches show such a view to be civilization-bound, falsified by the elements of creation that break these bounds. Such is the wild ass, who is explicitly contrasted with the prisoners of 3.18: Tt scorns the tumult of the city; it hears not the shouts of the taskmaster ' (39.7). And this is not because it is no longer in existence, but because it is free from the confines of the city and its human structures. 3 The prisoners, by contrast, only escape this din in the equalizing rest of death: all their existence they are prisoners of the socio-symbolic system. As portrayed in the Whirlwind speeches, then, humanity is no longer the measure of the creaturely world. There is a reality that transcends its intentionality, where there is a surplus of validity over meaning. Creation is teeming with this energy and purpose, a purpose whose revelation it is the object of the WTiirlwind speeches to accomplish — but it is a purpose not translatable into 12. Cf. Alter, Poetry, p. 97. 13. Cf. GOOD: 'there is a bursting, uncontainable vitality in [the animals portrayed] that outruns any kind of control' (p. 347).

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human terms: 'Is the wild ox willing to serve you?' (39.9); and therefore a revelation with validity but no human meaning. Such surplus animation, or untameable energy, is encountered even more palpably in the horse (39.19—25). The trouble or turmoil ( , rqge%) that constituted Job's pain (3.17, 26; 14.1) now describes the horse in its eagerness for battle: 'In excitement and agitation it swallows the ground; it cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet' (39.24). In both cases it depicts an energy unleashed, but in job's case as the drive towards annihilation, being both burdensome (cf. ) and terrifying ( in 3.25, and in 9.34; 13.21), and in the horse's case as something to be revelled in. " Indeed, the horse 'laughs at fear i pachady (39.22a), being itself that which evokes fear , 39.20b).16 Job's death-wish, driven by his disjointed existence as remainder, is converted here into a celebration of singularity. Such singularity, moreover, is brought into a complex relation with the sociosymbolic system. For even while the horse is made subservient to the greater purposes of the humanity in the battle for which it is employed, its singularity nevertheless bursts out of these. Indeed, it is prior to these purposes (cf. 39.19: 'Do you give the horse his might?'), being precisely that which is to be harnessed. But the danger in this is clear: in laughing at fear, the horse reveals its capability7 of shattering the fragile order humanity has sought to impose.

2 The Significance of the Transformation: The 'More' of the Covenant as Election By now we have seen the extent to which the Whirlwind speeches draw upon images used in Job's opening monologue, and the way in which they reconfigure them. These literary links suggest, as we have said, that the seeds of the Whirlwind speeches were already there in chapter 3.18 To discover in what way this might be so, it is worth recalling the thrust of the above 14. Following GORDIS'S translation of Cf. DRIVHR-GRAY, who translates 'quivering and excited'. 15. HABKL(p. 547) notes the associations of with earthquakes and cosmic disturbance (cf. 9.6): as this energy at the heart of creation, it is simultaneously vital and destructive. 16. Cf. HABl'.L, p. 547: 'The terrorizing power which precedes Yahweh into battle is felt when the horse signals his coming . . . And the dread ( ) which dismays Job (3.25, 23.15, 31.23) does not faze the horse.' 17. All this is taken much further in the descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan. While job wanted to raise up Leviathan as a force of chaos (3.8), God revels in its singularity, wholly unamenable to the purposes of humanity. This link with 3.8 is a powerful argument against those who wish simply to identify Leviathan with the Nile crocodile (HABKl., p. 570). Unfortunately 1 do not have space here for a full treatment of the themes of God's second speech. 18. Alter understands the Whirlwind speeches as an answer above all to the monologue ot job, allusions to the rest of the poem being scarce (Poetry, p. 104). In construing the verbal linkages in terms of reconfiguration and transformation, by contrast, I will place emphasis in what follows on the role of the dialogue as that which brings about this far-reaching transformation.

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observations in order to ascertain what the reconfiguration brought about really constitutes. In his monologue, Job has contracted creation to the zero point of extinction. All reality is caught up in this sweeping movement of annihilation by being converted into signs of Job's sufferings and inscribed within his own internal reality. It is in relation to this contraction that the Whirlwind speeches come as a great eruption or huge explosion, the elements of creation recoiling from their own compression into masses small enough to be eradicated within Job's internal world, in a great expansion in which they become masses that must be considered for their own sake — in which Job's internal reality explodes into the great panorama of external reality. This lends itself to a redescription in terms we are familiar with from above. Through the discovery and deeper probing of his internal otherness, Job is led to a recognition and acknowledgment of the reality of the external Other. Or rather, through the discovery of this external Other within, he is taken once more outside and beyond himself — but this time in a real encounter with this outside. Job's own singularity has erupted into the many singulars that constitute creation. It is this singularity of the Other or others that could not be compressed into nothingness, that constituted the recalcitrant and unwieldy reality that recoiled from this compression, transcending the adequacy of Job's imagination (which was naturally informed by the socio-symbolic world that these singulars defy), and that had to be considered for its own sake, not amenable to any purpose defined in terms of intentionality. It was, then, the enigmatic messages of this creaturely Other that called forth excitations within Job, constituting his singularity. The external otherness of the Whirlwind speeches is therefore the presupposition of the internal otherness of Job's monologue. This is the sense in which the seeds of the Whirlwind speeches are already there in chapter 3. Put differently, in the absence of an external Other, there would be nothing for Job to contract. This creaturely Other, then, is the true correlate of Job's singularity, being ultimately identifiable with the violence at the base of the law. But something quite profound has occurred in this identification. In chapter 3, Job started out in the abyss of his own singularity, which constituted for him the hub and measure of reality. As such, external reality could only be drawn along with Job into this abyss, appearing as mere indices of his suffering. In relation to this, the Whirlwind speeches — in their celebration of other creaturely singulars — seem a sheer impossibility. The rest of the dialogue involved Job's conceptualization of his singularity, at each point in its relation to an Other. This led him into the dialectic of his own wretchedness and integrity, held in place by an understanding of God as enemy, or the violence of the law, on the one hand, and friend, or vindicator in the face of this law, on the other. This dialectic propelled Job further and further inward towards a more and more intense and concrete experience of his wretchedness and integrity. This was the essential tenor of Job's journey, his conceptualization of the Other

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remaining a function of this journey into himself. In consequence, Job's Other in the dialogue was not yet a truly external and embodied Other, but an authority cited to ground and guarantee his perception of his own singularity — which was ultimately the citation of a lack. Job's Other, then, was not yet more than the conceptual matrix of his search — the system of filters in which he conceptualized God, which we previously identified with the tradition. As a result, only a delimiting construal of the 'more' of the Covenant was reached: as the surplus animation at the base of this tradition, creating in Job a corresponding surplus. It is only in the Whirlwind speeches that Job truly encounters the external 19 embodied reality of the Other, at which point the inward-propelling dialectic of the dialogue conceived in terms of justice is converted into an outward-propelling dialectic conceived in terms of creation. The violence of the law becomes the violence or destructive force of external reality, and Job's integrity becomes embodied in creaturely life. This creational dialectic thus locates the validity or violence of the law at the level of creation. In other words, God's act of violence in establishing the law is reinterpreted in terms of God's prevenient, non-negotiable — even arbitrary — act of creating, which can only appear as a 'brute fact' from within the created order, having no further grounds of legitimation, i.e. being self-grounding, just as was the law. As such, the law's surplus of validity over meaning is reinterpreted as the meaninglessness, or gratuity, of creation ex nihilo (or 'for naught'). In this way, the dynamics of the law are embodied in the dynamics of God's creating. But as such, God's choice to enter into a covenantal relation with the creature is one with his choice to create. God chooses the creature, in other words, not on the basis of its predicates (which presuppose its existence), but in the utter gratuity that brings the creature into existence in the first place, i.e. on the basis of its singularity. This is the creature's election. In identifying the violence of the law with the existence of the creaturely Other, therefore, the Whirlwind speeches enable an identification of the 'more' of the Covenant with the creature's election. Job's singularity is brought into being by God's gratuitous act of creation — his election of Job 'for naught'. It is this fundamental recognition of election, moreover, that allows Job to construe his singularity as integrity. For this construal cannot be based on the law: Job's singularity transcends the socio-symbolic dimension of the law, which therefore has no hold over it, whether to judge it just or unjust. Ultimately, then, this construal can only come from an understanding of the Covenant in its deeper dimension — which we can now equate with election. In the absence of this, Job's singularity could just as well be 19. This somewhat black and white construal of the distinction between dialogue and Whirlwind speeches will be complicated in Chapter 6 (see pp. 149—56) in a consideration of the development in the dialogue of Job's relation to his friends and acquaintances as physical others, as well as to his own body. Nevertheless, the friends as physical others are not yet the singulars envisaged in the Whirlwind speeches.

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understood as wretchedness through and through, Job as the plaything of a capricious God. But an understanding of God's commitment to Job on a deeper level, as one who has elected Job 'for naught', allows for a perception of God as other than capricious, and correspondingly for an understanding of the creature in its singularity as other than wretched, but rather as chosen or 'integral'. But this means that Job had an implicit perception of his own election right from the start: this perception was the driving force of his inward dialectic, enabling him to conceptualize his singularity in terms of integrity. The truth of the Whirlwind speeches, therefore, was not only present earlier on as that which Job attempts to reverse in his opening monologue, but more positively as the force which gave direction to Job's self-exploration in the dialogue. It is no surprise, then, that the dialogue ultimately had its culmination in the insight of the Whirlwind speeches. Indeed, if Job's integrity is rooted in his election, a probing of this integrity will inevitably lead to a recognition of election as its basis. This is the recognition that Job's singularity is the singularity of a creature of God, having its presupposition outside it in the God whose freedom is indicated in the existence of other singulars, which correspondingly cannot be contracted into Job's singularity as the centre of reality. In other words, Job probes his integrity to such an extent that he bashes up against creaturely reality, which resists his contraction of it. And this creaturely reality splinters into the myriad of creatures depicted in the Whirlwind speeches. The dialectic of the dialogue leads, therefore, to its own transcendence in the Whirlwind speeches. Job's legally construed integrity is reinterpreted as his existence as a creature of God. Creation trumps the law. But does this imply that the vision of the Whirlwind speeches displaces and leaves behind the legal conceptuality of the dialogue? Can a transcendent vision of creaturely reality dispense with the Covenant as an arbitrary human construct? A negative answer to this is suggested, in the first place, by our exegetical findings. We discovered the interplay of forces in the Whirlwind speeches to have a covenantal shape, implying that God's interaction with creation, even at this most basic level, is covenantal. This would suggest that the transcendence of the Whirlwind speeches is a transcendence within the Covenant — that they give expression precisely to the deeper dimension of the Covenant. This roots the Covenant in creation, showing it to be more than an arbitrary human structure. Second, moreover, it is inherent in the very dynamic of the relation between dialogue and Whirlwind speeches that the insight of election reached in the latter cannot leave Covenant behind. For this insight, as we discovered, was all along the driving force of the dialogue, leading Job into the legal dialectic which enabled the discovery of his integrity. This fact allows us, not only to reinterpret the arbitrary violence at the base of the law in terms of election, but conversely to understand election — as that which propels Job's legal dialectic — itself as the arbitrary force at the base of the law, or deeper

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dimension of the Covenant. As its deeper dimension, election cannot exist without the Covenant and its legal dialectic. This is confirmed, lastly, by the dynamic of the Whirlwind speeches themselves. Job's vision is suffused by a myriad of creaturely others who resist inscription within any sort of comprehensive whole, just as Job resisted the friends' attempted inscription of him within the Deuteronomic sociosymboHc system. Not only, then, is Job's conception of his all-consuming singularity exploded; this singularity is itself radically eclipsed. There is simply no place for it in relation to the other singulars, each of which on its own bursts out of all frameworks and exceeds Job's imagination. However, this encounter (to use Santner's term), while eclipsing Job's singularity, is also what constitutes the insight of his election, allowing him to construe his singularity as integrity. This is the dialectic of the Whirlwind speeches, at once eclipsing and establishing this perception of integrity. As such, however, it is not a stable vision. It can only take effect by sending Job back into the dialectic of the dialogue, in which Job may give expression to the perception of integrity embodied but eclipsed in the Whirlwind speeches. The dialectic of the Whirlwind speeches is, in other words, parasitic on that of the dialogue. As the deeper dimension of the Covenant, it cannot exist without the Covenant. The Whirlwind speeches do not, then, take Job outside and beyond all human institutions, but affirm an integrity he has within these — one which transcends them only as it is also bound up with them. 3 The Shape of Job's Obedience: Towards an Understanding of the Tor Naught' The friends harnessed the surplus animation of the socio-symbolic system in order to reinforce the system. By inscribing Job within it, they were able to deny and defend themselves against his singularity and the excitations this called forth in them. Job, on the other hand, as we have seen from the culmination of his wrestling in the Whirlwind speeches, harnesses the same surplus animation in such a way that he is brought into encounter with a myriad of other creaturely singulars. Instead of erecting defences against them as the friends had done, he makes way for this overwhelming vision. This is the fruit of his dialectic. However, Job cannot live in this state of encounter. If we are to look for the shape of his 'for naught' relation to God, therefore, we cannot rest with the Whirlwind speeches. As we have seen, they send Job back into the dialectic of the dialogue. The point of transcendence reached in the Whirlwind speeches cannot be severed from the process which leads up to it: dialogue and Whirlwind speeches together form an inward-propelling dialectic and its self-transcendence in an expansion outwards. Contraction and expansion thus belong together. It is this whole we must contemplate if we are to discover the dynamic of Job's integrity.

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Although not characterized solely by the truth of the Whirlwind speeches, Job's integrity nevertheless has this truth as its driving force and ultimate ground. As the encounter with other creaturely singulars, this truth involves Job's acknowledgment of the God who creates these singulars 'for naught', and thus of his own creation and election by God 'for naught'. In encountering God's creation as a Thou, he is called into being as a Thou himself. The dialectic of the dialogue is rooted in and moves towards this fundamental truth of Job's existence. Conversely, this truth only gains embodiment and manifestation in the movement that begins in Job's monologue, continues and is substantiated in the dialogue, and culminates in the Whirlwind speeches. It is of this movement, with its roots and culmination in Job's Thou, that I hope to give an account in description of his 'for naught' relation to God. What Job does is to wrestle with the law. This is neither to reject it, nor blindly to adhere to it. It involves, rather, an intense engagement with it by means of its critical questioning. Only in this way, we discover, is it possible for him to do justice to the law. The friends, by blindly adhering to it, achieve a kind of mastery over it in which they are able to silence its enigmatic messages. Job, by contrast, finds himself profoundly disturbed by these messages, a disturbance to which he gives expression by wrestling with the law. In this process he listens to its messages and begins to discern them. More significantly, however, in listening to them, he allows himself to be questioned by them. They call forth in him the identity he has beyond the law. In plumbing this, Job allows his identity within the law to be disrupted. This disruption of identity, set in motion by Job's deeper integrity, and leading him deeper into it, is, I contend, the quintessence of Job's 'for naught' relation to God. In it, the contractual dimension of the law, which could not contain a 'for naught' relation, is both relativized and affirmed by being rooted in something deeper. Job's wrestling with the law has this dialectical dynamic. However, this wrestling, in which Job probes the depths of his integrity, leads to a further disruption. Job has been railing against the arbitrariness of God at the base of the law, arguing that God's wielding of the law according to his own whim is a perversion of justice - that God should subject himself to the law. This is how he comes to express his integrity: as a claim on God in defiance of the arbitrariness of the law. However, this integrity is itself a sign of God's extra-legal nature as the one who has created Job for naught. And on his deeper probing of this integrity, this is precisely what Job discovers — when the violence of the law reasserts itself, in defiance of Job's defiance, as the violence of creaturely life. Job's disruption of the law, in other words, culminates in its own disruption. In this second disruption, Job is made aware of the fact that the enigmatic messages of the law he has all along been attempting to discern are in fact the enigmatic messages of other creaturely singulars. Indeed, it is fundamentally by these others that Job has been disrupted. It is they who have called his singularity into being, thereby disrupting his legal identity, and they once

1 1 . T H E \\' H 1 R L\\ I N D S P 1 < I/? the Silent, p. 152. 38. Used in a legal sense; cf. 13.3, where it is used in parallel with 39. Both of these can have non-legal meanings, which the context in part requires. However, their use in parallel and the wider context of Elihu's speech cannot help but bring out their legal connotations, thus drawing out an interpretation of the 'chastisement' depicted here as God's playing of his part in his legal trial against creation. 40. His principal accusation of Job is that he drinks up like water (v. 7). This means 'stammering' or 'scoffing' and verges on 'blasphemy'. In any case, it is a thoroughly verbal form of wickedness as compared with Eliphaz's analogous charge in 15.16 that Job drinks up iniquity like water. Cf. HABEL, p. 481, contra DRIVER-GRAY, p. 295: 'Elihu does not limit his charges against Job to sins of speech.' Cf. also 34.35-37 and 35.16.

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(conceived in terms of the doctrine of retribution). This is brought out in the contrast between 32.1, that the friends cease to answer Job because he was righteous in his own eyes (a wrong interpretation of his situation), and 32.2b, that Elihu was angry with Job because he vindicated himself rather than God (a false legal accusation of God). In sum, Elihu's problem with the friends is that they have not responded to Job's legal challenge of God's justice. They have thus left Job's imputation of arbitrariness and injustice to God intact and in need of an answer ( ). However, Elihu is now the one with the problem, for in order to tackle the question of God's justice there is need of a — to facilitate the trial between God and Job in which God's justice and authority can be defended and Job's accusations answered. But the very role of the - to ensure a fair trial and act to promote justice — is implicitly to question God's justice, ensuring that God's power does not get the upper hand by calling God to account. Elihu's argument, however, is that God is by definition just and his authority unquestionable: there is no standard of justice to which God is answerable. But in calling God to account, this is exactly what the must presuppose. Thus, to defend God's justice, Elihu must take up a role that implicitly undermines it.41 It would seem, then, that Elihu's only choice is to take up this role in order to subvert it. And when we follow his argument through to its end, we see that this is exactly what he does. The key verses in this respect are 37.19—20: ' Teach us what we shall say to him; we cannot draw up our case ) because o f darkness. Should h e b e told that I want t o speak ( ) ? Did anyone ever wish to be swallowed up?' But to 'draw up a case' ':ara£) is exactly what Elihu has challenged Job to do (33.5), and indeed what Job has done (13.18 cf. 32.14). It was precisely God's hearing of this case in the trial between Job and God that Elihu supposedly sought to facilitate. This subversion is even more forceful in v. 20, in which no room is left for the at all: to enter into legal contest with God is tantamount to bringing about one's own destruction. The trial that Elihu has staged, then, turns out also to have been hypothetical, just as Job's was. But in contrast to the latter, 41. This may have been the reason the friends chose never to dirty their own hands in such a legal dispute - in the belief that God's justice was beyond defence. 42. But this subversion has been implicit all along. Cf. esp. 34.23—25, which sums up God's ways with the world in most frightening terms. God works 'in the night', accountable only to himself. There is no place for public litigation (vv. 23-24) and thus no place for a . God acts on his own authority alone. Cf. v. 33a, b: 'Shall he requite on your terms since you object? Shall you choose and not he?' (POPF/s translation). Pope comments, 'Elihu accuses Job of arrogating to himself the divine prerogative of choice, of attempting to set the terms under which God must operate' (p. 226). This might well be a description of the activity of the 43. Cf. HABUI. on 37.19-20: '[God] is outside the jurisdiction of an earthly court' (p. 515). He recognizes that this serves to undermine Job's legal venture, but fails to see how it also undermines Elihu's defence, which equally relies on human processes of litigation (cf. also pp. 502-03).

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this is not because of God's ultimate arbitrariness, but because of his ultimate authority. This distinction is discernible in a comparison between the otherwise similar passages, chapter 23 (esp. w. 3, 8—9, then 13—17) and 37.23-24 (cf. 36.22-23). Job's inability to find God in chapter 23 is characterized by a fear of his terrible arbitrariness (w. 13—17), whereas Elihu wonders in awe at the loftiness of God's justice. In sum, the hypothetical nature of Elihu's trial — its collapsing in the very act of its being constructed — explains the fact that Elihu, even as , still fails to speak to God on behalf of Job. Elihu has constrained himself to being a spokesman for God's ultimate and unquestionable authority. In this way he has redefined the role of the , if this is not tantamount to annihilating this role altogether. 4 The Problematic of Challenging God's Authority While Elihu's contribution is essentially deconstructive, pulling down Job's much-laboured-over edifice and showing by his subversion of the role of the Job's bold and soul-searching questioning of God to have been in vain, it also brings to light the reason why this role of the ITID1Q has itself become so problematic for the book of Job as a whole — why in the first place Job is in the unusual situation of having no (9.33). Elihu reveals the role of the to be incompatible with God's intrinsic justice.44 What Job implicitly rejects in his fervent search for a t therefore, is just this, accusing God instead of arbitrariness. We may compare Job's situation to that of Israel's prophets. For them, the role of the is to cause God to repent of his particular destructive purposes (e.g. Amos 7.1—6). For Job, it is the structure implicitly undergirding this that is brought into question. God is ultimately also the judge. If he chooses, he may simply do away with the (as in the case of Ezekiel). This is God's ultimate arbitrariness, reinterpreted by Elihu as unfathomability: God's justice cannot be questioned because it precedes all questioning. In rejecting this, Job raises the role of the to the second power. Job is not just calling God to account for his particular actions (as would a ); he is calling God to account for his lack of accountability. Job requires the intercession of a precisely on account of the lack of place for a . But this is a logical impossibility and the only way out would seem to be Elihu's: God is accountable only to himself because he is intrinsically just. 44. The very dangerousness and riskiness of the role of the 7 as the one who questions this justice, is thereby exposed. The boldness needed by the for this task is brought out by Muffs in his portrait of the prophet: 'This second aspect [the role of the prophet as agent of the defendant in opposition to God] demands limitless psychic strength, independence of conscience, and intelligence . . . In this second role, the prophet is similar to the Baal Shem Tov, who is on intimate terms with his Creator and intuitively knows how to bend Him to his will. Because the prophet has an intimate relationship with the Holy One, Blessed Be He, he is able to approach the cloud of the Divine Presence audaciously' (L/>ve, p. 10).

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In sum, the role of the has become problematic because the book of Job involves a focusing on God's authority as such in distinction from individual acts and decisions of God. But this focus is the result of an uncovering of the two levels within the Deuteronomic Covenant: the level of reciprocal action (or the law) on the one hand; and the 'more' of the Covenant (or the arbitrariness at the base of the law as we came to understand it on the basis of Job's experience) on the other. However, if this is so, then the comes to have a much wider significance. For in my earlier discussion, the 'more' of the Covenant, its deeper level, was not only understood in this negative sense, but was discovered to have much richer and more promising connotations. Specifically, it came to be understood as God's election of Job (and all creation): God's relationship to creation 'for naught'. " As such, the is the one who probes and tests this 'for naught' on the part of God. In eliminating the f Elihu is thus expressing his unwillingness to probe God's 'for naught'. This is what an equation of God with justice ultimately is — a refusal to explore the nature of God's relation to creation. It is a buffer for all questioning such that God can never be understood in his identity as the one who elects. On the contrary, his act of creating can only be brute and impersonal in its unfathomability. But I have made the claim above that this is the only way out of the paradox that has been encountered. Is this really the case or does Job in fact find another way out? 5 God as

That Job does find another way out is suggested by the fact that he does not stop at the statement of 9.33 that there is no . It is at this point that the widely recognized link between this passage and the other two passages in which a third party to Job and God is mentioned (16.18—22 and 19.23—29) becomes relevant. And in this connection the question of who the is gains another dimension: in the debate concerning the possible identity of the with God himself. In relation to 9.33 there was no reason to pose this question because the had a concrete reference in its own right, requiring no further specification. But this reference becomes problematic in relation to the two later passages not least because Job now claims that such a does actually exist (in contrast to 9.33). For this immediately raises the question of where this has suddenly come from and what has led Job to such a conviction. Furthermore, there are certain characteristics attributed to the in these later passages that break out of the picture of the prophetic intercessor normally associated with the term . Most conspicuously, Job's witness is in heaven (16.19a). And as Pope says of Job's vindicator ( ) in 19.25: 'It is certain that here Job does not have in mind a human agent who will act as his vindicator' (p. 134). In all the prophetic 45. Cf. pp. 11 Iff.

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examples noted above the was squarely human, and I have argued that in 9.33 Job laments the lack of such a human prophetic figure. In 16.18— 22 and 19.23—29, then, do we have a transformation and re-envisioning of the figure, or something totally new? 18 Oh earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place. 19 Even now, behold, my witness ) is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high. Let him be my advocate, my friend before God, when my eye weeps in his presence. (16.18—20)

Continuity between 9.33 and this first passage is indicated in several ways. First, (W, witness, v. 19a) is a legal term often used in conjunction with (^anah\ 7 and in the book of Job . . _ _ and are very closely associated. Moreover, the activity of the .. is described only two verses later precisely as (hokiach, v. 2la): a

Let him plead for a man with God, bas a fellow does for his friend.30

21 a describes the intercessory role of the on behalf of humanity with God, which is what Job wanted in 9.33 (and what Ezekiel was prevented from being). 21 b is grammatically ambiguous. It could either be translated as above, understanding to mean 'son of man'; or could be read as a defective spelling of , giving rise to the meaning: 'as between a man and his friend7. 51 This would evoke the in the gate of Amos 5.10 and Isa. 29.21, and the witness described in 21 a as interceding between God and humanity would be compared to this inter-human arbiter in 21b. If we opt for the first interpretation, however, the witness of 21 a would be compared with the son of man of 21 b, both of whom intercede for humanity with God. This apparently clumsy and obtuse reference to a 'son of man' seems redundant until we remember that the very novelty of the witness in this passage (in relation to 9.33) is precisely that it is not a human agent. The point of the comparison, then, is to stress that it functions in just the same way as the normally human would have done, even if not human itself. Thus continuity is preserved within the discontinuity. This is an attractive solution to the grammatical dilemma.

46. Following HABEL in the translation of v. 20. This is a notoriously difficult verse to translate, possibly owing to corruption of the text. I will not discuss the various possibilities here. 47. E.g. Job 16.8; Exod. 20.16 and Deut. 5.20. 48. Occurring in parallel in 32.12 and 40.2, and in close conjunction in chapter 9. 49. Several commentators make the connection between this activity of and the of 9.33, e.g. DRIVER, ROWLEY, GOOD and HABEL.

50. Following POPE'S translation, taking the subject to be the witness mentioned in v. 19. 51. Opting for the first are POP]':, CLINES, and for the second, GOOD, ROWLEY, GORDIS.

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The next passage runs as follows (19.23—25): ~~ Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! 24 Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were graven in the rock for ever! "" For I know that my vindicator i ) lives, And at last he will rise up ( ) upon the earth . . .

The primary context of the term (go*el, Vindicator', v. 25a) is an interhuman one, where it denotes, for example in Prov. 23.10—11, 'the defender of the widow and orphan, the champion of the oppressed'/ Moreover, its use in this verse in conjunction with the verb i (qum, 'to rise up') gives it a manifest legal turn, reminding us of the witness, , in 16.19a, a term with which the verb is elsewhere closely associated (e.g. Job 16.8; Deut. 19.15F and Ps. 27.12)." And we are reminded even more strongly of the in the gate in Amos 5.10 etc., whose inter-human legal role is analogous. However, unlike in the case of there is strong precedent for a derived use of the term to denote Yahweh, thus breaking out of the inter-human sphere (e.g. Exod. 6.6; 15.13; Jer. 1.34; Isa. 43.1).54 It therefore contains within itself the discontinuity captured in the comparison between the two halves of 16.21 — between the human and the heavenly — and so is ideally design to effect the shift involved in this reenvisioning of the figure. But this begs the question even more pressingly: does this shift involve its identification with God? According to Pope 'the heavenly witness, guarantor, friend can scarcely be God who is already Accuser, Judge, and Executioner.'5^ But this is hardly a compelling reason not to take the figure to be God. On the contrary, precisely this dichotomy in God is expressed in 27.2: 'As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter...'" ' And as I have already argued extensively, Job's dual image of his Other (God) is the necessary correlate of the dialectic of his wretchedness and integrity/ Moreover, if this figure is not to be identified with God, who on earth is she and from where has she suddenly emerged? As Gordis notes, there is a tendency to unacceptable vagueness where an identification with God is not CO

52. POPK, p. 134. 53. For the legal connotations of the verb , cf. HABKL, pp. 293, 305; CLINKS, p. 460. 54. It is not a controversial point that God often takes on what are normally human roles. What is more interesting is when the role or roles taken on lead to a conflict of portrayal. God's taking on the role of the however, would be inherently conflictual, for it entails God's arguing against God. To make this identification would be an innovation on the part of the book of Job.

55. POPK, p. 118. Cf. also HABKL, pp. 274-75. 56. As GORDIS argues, p. 527. 57. See pp. 96-97.

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made.58 And because, in this case, it is wholly unclear what has led Job to such a conviction, the passages are left to hang aloof from their context in the poem. If, on the other hand, this figure is God, then it can be seen much more clearly how these passages have evolved out of their context and that they are in fact integral to it. This is evident in a new way from the above exploration of the function of the in Job. For the whole point is that a human is no longer adequate, or more strongly, has no place (as Job understands in 9.33 and as Elihu shows at length in his speech). It is hardly likely that a non-human but nevertheless creaturely intercessor would fare any better. After all, the problem is in part a logical one relating to the nature of God's authority, and a non-human intercessor would stand in exactly the same logical relation to God as a human one. Job's only way out, indeed his very innovation, is to find his in God. Only this, furthermore, could account for the fact that Job, in the third passage, beholds God on his side and as unestranged (19.27). If the has always previously been human, this identification of the with God is nevertheless not made in a vacuum, and indeed has, if not a precedent, a precursor and prototype. And I searched [among the candidates for prophecy] for a man, a fence-mender, somebody who would stand in the breach against Me on behalf of the land, that I not destroy the land. But I did not find one, and I poured out my wrath upon them' (Ezek. 22.30—31). Here, the role of the prophet is to go up into the breach (the breach in Israel's moral being, its sin) and to act as a protective wall in order to deflect the Lord's destructive wrath from the people. This function is also described in Ezek. 13.4—5: Tike foxes in the ruins were your prophets, Israel; you did not rise in the fortifications to create a protective wall on behalf of the house of Israel, and to be ready for the battle on the day of the Lord.'6" And as Muffs argues, 'the enemy is not the army of the gentiles that is placing a siege around Jerusalem. The Lord Himself is the enemy, the warrior who is setting His face against Jerusalem to destroy it' (p. 31). But most significantly 58. GORDIS, p. 527, in criticism of POPE, who suggests a Sumerian background to Job's thought in these passages, according to which 'each man had a personal god who acted as his advocate in the council of the gods' (pp. 74—75); Job's vindicator serves just this function (pp. 134—35). But this hardly fits within Job's intensely monotheological vision in which all that has befallen him is laid at the foot of God; nor does it really extricate him from his dilemma. Habel identifies this figure as the 'ideal friend' that Job clearly does not have in his present comforters ('Only the Jackal is My Friend: Redeemer Figures in the Book of Job', Int 31, 1977, pp. 227—36). This is somewhat speculative and cannot account for the fact that Job's witness is in heaven. CLINES argues that Job's witness or champion is his protestation of innocence (pp. 390, 459). This is an appealing solution, but need not preclude an understanding of God as the ultimate ground of this innocence. Among those who identify the figure with God are GORDIS and ROWLEY. 59. Again, see pp. 96-97. 60. For this translation of , see p. 154 below: 61. Muffs's translation, luove, p. 31. 62. Love, p. 31.

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for our purposes here, it is God who searches for the prophet, for the one who is to defend the people against himself. Thus in this function (as in his pronouncement of the divine oracles) the prophet is acting on behalf of God.6" It is thus not such a big step to the elision of God and God's prophet and the resultant equation of the with God himself. 6 Job as

What does Job achieve in this equation? Or rather, how does it provide him with a way out of Elihu's dilemma? This can ultimately only be understood from the perspective of the Whirlwind speeches, and specifically the final occurrence of the term in 40.2. In identifying the with God, Job has placed the , the argument, dialogue or trial, within God himself. He can still maintain God's arbitrariness, but without implying that God is beyond all reasonableness and argument: God's dialogical structure is more fundamental than his bare arbitrariness. However, is this really different from Elihu's view? That God is reasonable in himself, or intrinsicaDy just, is exactly what Elihu claimed. And just as God's justice was inaccessible to Elihu, so is God's dialogical reason inaccessible to Job: there may be a trial taking place in God, but it is not one in which Job participates; it happens rather above his head. Is this really any better than no trial at all, for Job will still not be able to ascertain God's answer ; )? For this reason the decisive step is only made in 40.2, when God equates the with Job (the third occurrence of the term in the book):64 Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? The of God, let him answer it!

In this way, Job himself is drawn into the divine dialogue and trial, being allowed to partake. The role that Job has played throughout the dialogue, as one who argues with God and questions his authority, is thereby ratified and legitimated. Even more importantly, this equation of God reinstitutes the role of the and reconstitutes the place for this figure that Elihu presumed to eliminate, thus allowing God's authority to be challenged in a way that would have shocked and appalled Elihu. And this place is within God himself and the dialogue that is already taking place there. This institution of Job as , by which he is included within the divine dialogue, is perhaps ultimately what effects the shift from the prologue to the 63. Indeed, that the is fundamentally bound up with God, functioning within God's purpose, is already suggested by the fact that it is God who forbids and then releases Ezekiel to act as for the people. 64. GOOD (p. 349) recognizes the potential significance and crucialness of the reappearance of the here but does not quite know what to make of it. There is also the faint possibility here that God is referring to lilihu, who previously claimed to be the In this case, God's words would more naturally function as a dismissal of the one who had arrogated himself to the role of and abused it.

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epilogue. It would explain, at least, why Job's sacrifices for his children in the prologue were ineffective while the sacrifice he carries out on behalf of his friends in the epilogue is accepted by God. In both cases Job enacts the role of the , interceding with God on behalf of his fellow humans. " But in the prologue his activity cannot bridge the gulf between the heavenly and earthly realms — which remains the prerogative of the Satan (1.12, 2.7). It would seem that he has not yet been granted the privilege of participating in the divine dialogue, and because the trial concerning him goes on above his head his activity as is rendered futile. It is only in the course of the poem, in which Job learns how to argue with God, that he learns how truly to be a This is the apprenticeship by which God initiates him into the divine dialogue. Conversely, it is Job's effective enactment of the role of the that results in a transformation within Job's society. Job's inclusion within the divine dialogue says something, moreover, about the nature of God's 'for naught'. To recall, God's arbitrary authority, as the 'more' of the Covenant, also has the deeper import of God's relation to creation 'for naught'. Not only is Job enabled to challenge and probe this, but he is enabled to do so by his participation in the activity of God which precedes and anticipates his own. God's 'for naught', as his precedence over Job, is something which intimately involves Job (and by extension all creation), bringing about a participation of creation in God such that God can be said to be 'unestranged' (19.27) from creation. However, the dynamic of this participation is paradoxical. God says to Job (40.2): Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? The o f God, l e t h i m answer i t ) !

The text follows (40.3-5): Then Job answered ) the Lord and said: 'See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoke once, and will not answer ( ); twice, but will proceed no further.'

In effect this says, 'Job answered, "I will no longer answer."' Although the use of (^anab, answer) in the introductory formula is standard, the importance of the word in Job as a whole and particularly in the immediate context (40.2 and 5, either side of the formula) inevitably draws our attention to the paradox of Job's answering with a non-answer. In other words, Job's affirmation as a i.e. as one who answers (cf. the parallelism in 40.2b),66 entails its simultaneous undermining. We stand once more before the dialectic of the Whirlwind speeches. Previously I understood this as Job's encounter with the otherness of creaturely reality, which entailed an eclipse of his self, 65. Cf. HABKL, p. 88, who notes the link between Job's role as mediator in both prologue and epilogue and his longing for a personal mediator before God in 9.32—35 and 19.23—29. 66. Or as one who 'engages in legal dispute'; cf. 32.12 and the discussion of !"[]£? on p. 126.

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his decentring, on the one hand, and his being placed before his election on the other (the arbitrariness of God being reinterpreted as the gratuity of creation ex nihilo^ in which God elects creation for naught)/ This may now be reinterpreted in terms of God's activity in the Whirlwind speeches as that which brings about Job's participation in God. While this establishes Job as on the one hand, it is also a (re-)assertion of God's radical precedence in relation to creation, as the one who already includes within himself the whole of creation. As such, the annihilation effected by Job's allencompassing singularity in the dialogue is subjected to a radical reversal, God asserting Godself over against Job's claim to be the only existing nub of reality remaining. Such precedence, however, does indeed involve an affirmation of Job as insofar as it is the precedence of the one who elects. God's eclipse of Job's self is precisely what establishes Job as sending him back into the dialectic of the dialogue.

67. Cf. pp. 111-13.

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6 A.n Integrity beyond the Law

In equating Job with the (mokiacK), God retrospectively actualizes Job's hypothetical trial, asserting that Job really has been engaged in dialogue with him — that he has, in other words, really engaged in (hokiacK). And this is precisely Job's testing and probing of God's 'for naught'. In a closer investigation of the unfolding of this in the dialogue (not least through its many verbal occurrences), we will come to an understanding of what this probing more concretely consists in. How exactly does Job challenge God, and what sort of search does this involve him in, in contrast to Elihu's refusal of any such search?

1

and the Dynamics of Facing God

Job's first use of the verb activity (6.25-26):

is in a negative description of the friends'

How forceful are honest words! But your arguing ( ), what does it prove ( \ ) ? Do you think that you can argue ( ) with words, when the speech of a despairing man is wind? This is a very difficult verse to translate, many possibilities offering themselves. For the present purposes, however, I am interested only in the nature of the friends' Is this to be understood within a legal or wisdom context? Crucial in this regard is Elihu's remark: there is no to be found among the friends (32.12). In other words, they have no intention of entering into legal debate with Job. And even Job at this point has not yet begun to mount his trial against God or to embark on a full rigorization of the legal metaphor. Thus Good's translation, c . . . and how your indictment indicts! Are you scheming to indict talk?' (w. 25b—26a), is perhaps a little premature. The friends have been taking part in something more like a 'wisdom disputation'. This is not to say that their activity does not have legal implications. Indeed, the effect of their arguments, as we have 1. See below, p. 143. 2. 'The argumentative refutation of the position taken by the other party' (BOTfKRWKCK, vol. 6, p. 70).

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seen, is to reinscribe Job within the law. This is the nature of without a It can only be an insipid and diluted (if ultimately life-denying) affair, for without a there can be no challenging of God. Indeed, the friends, like Elihu, presuppose the unquestionability of God's justice; e.g. 8.3: 'Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?' God's unfathomability is interpreted as a prohibition of all such questioning (11.7f). Thus they exhort Job to seek God's mercy rather than challenge him (8.5f, 5.8). For his challenge will receive no answer i .5.1). Any on the part of God is interpreted not as such an answer or engagement in argument but rather as reproof to be undergone as discipline, e.g. 5.17. That is, it is entirely removed from the legal sphere. Instead of being a challenging of God, then, the friends' is a reinforcing of the status quo, of received wisdom (cf. 8.8£, 15.17E). Because Job is a threat to this established order, the friends' only recourse is to reinscribe him within it. Their is the work of this reinscription, turning Job into a movable counter within the law: 'You would even cast lots over the fatherless, and bargain over your friend.' (6.27). In the face of this, Job appeals to the friends on the basis of his sheer humanity — on the basis of the fact that he is more than an object within the law. Indeed, he appeals to something deeper within the friends themselves, which transcends their petty arguing, in the hope that they might in turn recognize something deeper in him which transcends the object over which they bargain: 'But now, be pleased to look ( ; at me; for I will not lie to your face ( )' (6.28). Job thereby distinguishes between two levels or modes of relating: arguing (6.25—26) and facing , panah, 'turn toward', from which _ _ _ , panim, 'face', is derived; 6.28) — which we might liken to the two levels of the Covenant. The latter mode, facing, presupposes and draws on a deeper, primordial connection between the two parties which is not jeopardized (although it may be distorted and even denied, as apparently it is by the friends here) by any argument or that might be engaged in. It is this deeper connection to which Job appeals/ However, if Job rejects here a relation of arguing in favour of a relation of facing, by chapter 13 this dichotomy appears to have been overcome. In the first place, we find that Job himself has adopted the he previously 3. CLINES distinguishes the friends' as 'banal generalities' which do not really address Job's situation, from the 'significant communication' which could occur if they only looked at Job and paid attention to him as a person rather than treating him as a commodity to be bargained with (v. 27) (pp. 181—82). According to POPE, 'he challenges them to look him in the face and read therein his honest anguish. He can look them in the eye and declare that he is innocent' (p. 54). In other words, if they would only recognize the humanity of Job, they would see that it transcends and brings in question their calculating and inhuman rhetoric. Several scholars also note the change of attitude (repentance) implied by ('turn', twice in v. 29), e.g. ROWLEY, CLINES, DRIVER, HABEL. The implication would seem to be that Job wishes to relate to the friends on a deeper level which is not touched by their , but on which his real integrity (or innocence, v. 29b) is located.

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rejected: 'Hear now my reasoning ( ), and listen to the pleadings i ) of my lips' (13.6). And second, t h i s i s precisely that which involves him in a relation of facing, indeed in a relation to the face of God: 'yet I will defend ( ) my ways to his [God's] face i ' (13.15b). The opposition between and facing has apparently been dissolved. And more than this, each form of relating seems to be entailed in the other. What has enabled this transition to take place? As Habel notes, 'the key word which governs the focus of this pretrial speech [13.6—28] is the "face" of God.'4 Its first occurrence in this speech is in an idiomatic expression implemented by Job in accusation of the friends (13.8, cf. 13.10, where the same expression is used):

'lWill you show partiality toward him, Vill you plead the case for God?

The idiom in 13a literally means 'to lift the face (of another)', deriving from the situation in which a subject crawled into the king's presence. If he found favour with the king, the king would 'lift his face' from its prostrate position.5 But ironically, Job envisages the friends as the king and God as their subject, implying that the friends speak of God as if he were at their disposal.' What is significant, however, is that the friends do enjoy a relation to the face of God, even if a distorted one: Job implicitly equates the friends' , their reinforcement of the status quo and refusal to challenge God, with a manipulation of the face of God (which corresponds, perhaps, to their reinscription of Job within the law). In this, the opposition between _ and facing is dissolved negatively. does not exempt the friends from a relation of facing. And conversely, as it will turn out, Job, in order to enjoy a right relation of facing, cannot simply jump out of the activity of Rather, in order to establish this right relation, he must challenge God, i.e. rehabilitate precisely as a breaking with the status quo. This is exactly 4. HABI.U p. 226. 5. Cf. Gen. 40.9—23 (esp. w. 13, 19), in which there is a play on an equivalent expression. 6. The use of this expression with God as the object is very unusual. Elsewhere, it expresses: the showing of favour in a positive sense e.g. Gen. 19.21; 1 Sam. 25.35; Mai. 1.8, and by God in Job 42.8, 9; the lifting up of one's own countenance in righteousness before God e.g. Job 11.15; 22.26 (the friends' usage); or negatively in legal settings, the showing of partiality and thus the distorting of justice e.g. Lev. 19.15; Job 32.21; 34.19; Deut. 10.17. The usage in 13.8 falls within the last of these categories, but departs from the norm by making God the object. The 'lifting up of God's face' does occur in non-legal settings, in which there is a request for God to lift his countenance', e.g. Num. 6.26; Ps. 4.6[7], but here God is also the subject and the meaning very different. In connection with this expression, HABKL notes an interesting wordplay in Job 13.10—11: '"Lifting the face" (v. 10) means a demonstration of favor and partiality. When God appears, his "exalted presence" , literally, his "lifted-up-ness", will terrify rather than portend reciprocal favors' (p. 229). This captures something of the reversal effected in the dangerous enterprise of which Job accuses the friends.

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his intent in 13.3: 'But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case ( ) with God.' And as we will discover, Job's , his probing of God's 'for naught', involves him in a complex relation to the face of God. To this complexity I will now turn. A further key word in this 'pretrial speech', into relation with which (face) is brought, is the root (satar), 'hide, conceal', and so 'secrecy'. Its first occurrence, in 13.10, elaborates job's earlier accusation of the friends in 13.8: 'He will surely rebuke you ( ) if in secret ( ) you show partiality toward him' (13.10). What is the force of in secret, here? f Given the root meaning of ('hide'), might it suggest that the domesticating of God's face (lifting it) in actual fact involves hiding from its fullness and force? The root occurs two more times in the chapter in conjunction with First is v. 20: 'Only grant two things to me, then I will not hide myself ( ) from your face ( ).' Given its verbal connections with v. 10, might this verse be understood as Job's resolution in contrast \£> what he accuses the friends of having done in v. 10, i.e. hide from God's face? Indeed, it is precisely his boldness in coming before God that singles him out from the godless: 'This will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him [God] i )' (13.16). The second conjunction of and is found in v. 24: 'Why do you hide ) your face ( i, and count me as your enemy?' This implies, in contrast to w. 8, 10, that it is impossible to manipulate God by choosing whether or not to lift his face: it is God's doing alone if he choose to show his face. This means, however, that it is only subject to God's freedom and power that Job can subsequently make his own decision to come before God. } in other words, must thus take place within the parameters of this freedom if it is to involve a right relation of facing. It must be drawn into this dialectic of hiddenness/unhiddenness, in which Job comes before God's face on the one hand (v. 16), and God hides his face from Job on the other (v. 24); in which Job has chosen to face God on the one hand (v. 20), and such a choice is supremely in the hands of God on the other (w. 25—28). This dialectic is complicated further when both 3.10 and 14.13 are brought into its orbit. In contrast to 13.24, in which Job bewails God's hiding of his face, 14.13 expresses his wish to be hidden from God: 'Oh that you would conceal me ( j in Sheol, that you would hide me ( / until your wrath is past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me.'8 If in 13.24 the absence of God's face, as an expression of his wrath, means his 7. God's hiding of his face is often (and most likely in this context also) an expression of wrath e.g. Deut. 31.17-18; Isa. 8.17; 54.8; Jer. 33.5; Ezek. 39.23-24; Ps. 27.9. Cf. CUNES, p. 319. It might here be understood more precisely as God's terrifying incomprehensibility, as will become more apparent below. 8. To understand this primarily as a wish for resurrection (e.g. ROWLEY) fails to recognize the primary context of this verse as caught up in the dialectic of hiddenness/unhiddenness (in relation to such verses as 13.20, 24). Sheol, in this connection, is simply where God is not — where Job can escape from this dialectic. Cf. Amos 9.2-3 (for a negative comparison).

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bearing towards Job as enemy, then in 14.13 it is the very presence of Job to God's face which means his exposure to God's wrath and thus God as enemy. Exposure to God's face would seem to involve its simultaneous obscuration from view. Encounter with it would seem to be encounter with its very hiddenness — this terrifying and incomprehensible abyss — such that Job's encounter with God can only be in the form of God's enemy. This recalls the nature of the Covenant in its deeper dimension, which not only presupposes God's unconditional commitment to Job, but entails Job's exposure to the arbitrariness at the base of the law. The language of facing is one powerful way of giving expression to this deeper dimension of Job's relation to God. That exposure to the face of God must take on this agonizing and tortuous form is already anticipated in chapter 3, in which the abyss of existence that Job finds himself in (later to be equated with the arrows of God, 6.4f, implying God's presence) is experienced as sheer pain. 3.10 brings this to forceful expression: 'because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb, and hide x ) trouble ( ) from my eyes.' Here, exposure to God — which is how Job later reinterprets his affliction (e.g. 6.4f, 14.13) — is experienced simply as exposure to Carnal). It is therefore as early on as chapter 3 that Job enters (or rather is thrown) into a relation to the face of God which at once obscures and exposes, involving him in a dialectic of hiddenness/unhiddenness. This is the dynamic of his pain, which in chapter 3 is expressed in its raw and unmetabolized state. It is only later that it gains the conceptual clarity in which it becomes the root of Job's rehabilitation of the friends' As we have seen, the essence of this rehabilitation is the breaking out of the insularity of the friends' by the challenging of God. We have seen how this challenge involves Job in a complex relation to the face of God, in which God's very presence to Job is an alien, incomprehensible and therefore painful presence, and thus one which ultimately obscures God from view. However, the logic of this challenge as a new form of is yet to be discovered.

2 Job's Mock Trial We encounter this new form of in chapter 9. For it is here that Job begins to construct his relation to God in legal terms, setting up God as his opponent at law in a trial in which Job might argue the case for his integrity. 9. This recalls Earth's dialectic of veiling/unveiling in which Job's suffering is caused by the fact that God is present to him in an alien form — the fact that on the one hand he knows he has to do with God, and on the other no longer recognizes God in this form. God's very presence is that which obscures him from view. 10. HABKL understands chapter 9 to be the first place at which Job contemplates litigation against God, focusing specifically on the question of divine justice (p. 185). GOOD also recognizes this to be the first argument of Job that 'turns on the language of law and legal procedure' (p. 221). Zuckerman holds Job's response to be cast in terms of a legal grievance or and chapter 9 to be the first time this legal recourse is had (Job the Silent, p. 106).

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As is chapter 23, this is a chapter thick with legal terminology11 — and perhaps the place where this is most pivotally so. It is set in motion by Job's wish to contend , rib} with God in v. 3. is parallel in v. 3 to the verb (^anah), 'to answer', or perhaps better, 'to engage (in legal dispute)', as we concluded from Elihu's usage of it. " This verb appears four more times in chapter 9 (w. 14, 15, 16, 32), conjuring up a hypothetical legal contest between Job and God. The word (mishpaf), again best translated 'litigation' or 'trial' in the context of this chapter, occurs three times (w. 15, 19, 32) in reference to the longed-for but ultimately never-to-be trial between Job and God. And further, this 'mock trial' stands or falls with the existence of the in 9.33, the mention of which forms an inclusio with the legality of the initial verses. The ultimate lack of the , collapsing the carefully constructed edifice, is what renders the trial hypothetical or 'mock'. However, its hypothetical nature is not equivalent to its non-existence. For something is effected in the transition through construction and collapse. Job sets up this trial on the basis of a parody of the friends' arguments. 9.2b takes up Eliphaz' rhetorical question of 4.17a with a subtle alteration. The latter reads: in comparison with 9.2b: While the former is naturally translated 'Can a human being be righteous before God?', the legal context of the latter suggests the rewording: 'How can a human being win against God?' This change is also signalled by the alteration in the preposition, from (before) to (with or against). While evokes the inescapable inequality of God and humanity, most readily suggests the equality of God and the human being, the context further indicating this to be the equality of opponents in a lawsuit. In v. 3 reappears (again with God as the object) in conjunction with making this legal opposition explicit. Job has transformed Eliphaz's moral statement of humanity's impurity in relation to God into the legal statement of humanity's legal impotence in relation to God. Thus (tsadeq) is shifted from the moral sphere, in which its primary meaning is 'righteousness' to the legal, where it primarily connotes 'vindication'. 14 The legal metaphor was already implicitly present in the friends' , most clearly in their rendition of the doctrine of retribution. However, it coexisted with this other idiom appropriate for expression of the incongruity between God and creation, as in 4.17—21, which would seem to render the 11. Cf. pp. 123-24, where fuller definitions are also given. 12. Having its counterpart in chapter 31, where Job's hypothetical challenge of God becomes actual. See pp. 149—57 below. 13. See pp. 126-27. 14. Cf. HABEL, p. 185; GOOD, p. 221; Zuckerman, job the Silent, p. 106.

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doctrine of retribution irrelevant. It is precisely the slippage between idioms that allows for the juxtaposition of these apparently incompatible positions. Thus, while the friends' was able comfortably to house this contradiction, Job's rigorization of the legal metaphor has the result of sharpening it to the point of collapse. What the friends were able to hide or bypass through this shift in idiom, Job lays bare — as follows: Job's answer to his own question in 9.2, 'who can win against God?', is twofold. First is v. 3: 'If one wished to contend i ) with him, he would not answer him ( ) 15 one in a thousand.' In other words, God cannot be called to account or questioned: there is no He is accountable only to himself, is his own authority. As grounded in and sustained by this authority, therefore, the law is ultimately arbitrary. What God says goes. Second is v. 4: 'He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength — who has resisted him and succeeded?' In other words, the force that grounds the law and upholds its boundaries is the work of God's might. The law is sustained by an act of sheer violence. This arbitrariness and violence permeates the rest of the chapter, being captured most succinctly in v. 19: 'If it is a contest of strength, he is the strong one! If it is a matter of litigation , who can summon him?' This, then, is what Job lays bare: that the law is rooted in arbitrary violence, and that this arbitrary violence is God. The friends safeguard themselves against this exposure of the rotten basis of the law by recourse to God's transcendence, either in moral terms (4.17—21), or in the conceptual terms of his unfathomabiliry (11.7f). This recourse, or change of idiom, functions as a buffer to any questioning or challenging of God and thus creates a safe domain in which the doctrine of retribution can work without being undermined in the way that Job has shown it to be. 16 Job's 'mock trial' thus has the effect of laying bare the contradiction within the friends' But insofar as it undermines itself in so doing, how does 15. Taking God to be the subject and man the object, following Zuckerman (Job the Silent, n. 307), HABKL and DHORMK. 16. This account of Job's trial resonates strongly with that offered by Zuckerman (Job the Silent, pp. 104—17). He makes a distinction between the legal proceedings themselves and the legal authority or authority of enforcement behind them. In the Ancient Near East the authority to enforce was coupled with judgeship and in turn was often seen as deriving from God. Zuckerman's theory is that Job targets this fundamental juridical assumption that all authority derives from God and as such endeavours to divorce God from his role as Ultimate Legal Authority, requesting him to give up this power and step down into the position of defendant (e.g. 10.2 and 13.21-2). This legal edifice explodes, however, when God appears in the theophany as one who cannot be captured within the legal system. As the 'lawless' one he reasserts his authority and thereby paradoxically affirms the rule of the law. In my account, however, it is not a matter of Job's forcing God to step down from his position of authority in order to create the context for a fair trial; his complaint is aimed at this authority as such. He is calling God to account for his lack of accountability — for the impossibility of causing God to step down from his position and enter the trial. The paradox which for Zuckerman came to a head only in the theophany is on my account inherent in the terms of Job's trial.

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it constitute a rehabilitation of this And further, how does it bring Job 'face to face' with God? The key to this is found in the significant reappearance of the word (tam^ 'having integrity') — the crucial term in the description of Job at the beginning of the prologue, which was brought in question by the Satan and subsequently subjected to critical scrutiny in the poem — and more specifically, the interplay between the words and ( (tsadeq, 'be righteous') in this 'mock trial' of chapter 9.17 is the term Job has taken over from the friends (4.17a), capturing it fully within a legal sphere of meaning (9.2b). It occurs again in 9.14—15, which further emphasizes the paradox of a trial against a defendant whose fundamental inequality from Job undermines the procedure in which equality is a prerequisite (as implied by the terms and ): 'How much less shall I answer i ) him, and choose out my words to reason with him ( ^ Whom, though I were righteous ( i), yet would I not answer ), but I would make supplication to my judge.' (AV) Its next occurrence, however, this time in conjunction with , is the most significant (9.20-22): 20 21 22

20 (

Though I were righteous, mine own mouth would condemn me; I am perfect; and he declares me crooked! 21 I am perfect; I do not know myself; 17. The root (tamam) and its derivatives have a fairly wide semantic range. I will explore this more thoroughly in connection with its particular uses in Job in the following. Suffice it now to sketch its main contours (cf. VANGEMEREN, vol. 4, pp. 306—08). Its root sense is 'complete, blameless, perfect'. As a verb it takes on the range of meaning from 'to be finished' to 'to be blameless'. The adjective is principally used in the cultic context to describe an animal free of blemish. It occurs in parallel with and with an ethical sense of 'pious' and 'upright', and is sometimes used in legal contexts with the sense of 'innocent' (e.g. Pss.18.23; 19.13[14]; 7.8[9]). The adjective and the correlative noun occur almost exclusively in the book of Job and never in cultic contexts, with a meaning which overlaps in the main with the ethical and legal senses outlined here. However, the adjective has a rather different sense in Ps. 73.4, where it refers to the healthy and strong bodies of the wicked. This physical connotation is a distinctive resonance present more widely in the root, most apparently in the nom. denoting a sound and healthy body (Pss. 38.3[4]; 7[8]; Isa. 1.6), but also in the physicality of the sacrificial animal and further in the use of in the Song of Songs as a term of endearment, meaning the flawless/perfect one. This connotation will become important later. The importance of this root for the book of Job is fairly widely recognized, if not often investigated in more depth (cf. HABEL, p. 86, pp. 193f. and GOOD, pp. 224-25). Cook brings out its significance much more creatively, suggesting that the book might be regarded as a series of improvisations on it: '[of] common concern to both prose tale and verse drama in their juxtaposed unity, and central to the man at the center of both, is the integrity of Job, his wholeness' (The Root, p. 14).

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1 loathe my life. ""It is all one; therefore I say, 18 he destroys both the perfect and the wicked.

Pivotal in this is the interaction between the two half-verses of 9.20. On the one hand, the distinction between them may be emphasized, a cue being taken from the lack of the (if or though) at the beginning of the second half-verse. In this case, the word need not be understood in strict parallelism with , but as something new in relation to it. This is reflected in the translation above, which instead aligns (tam-^ani) in 20b with its repetition in 2la, both being treated as exclamations. 20a can in turn be understood as a unit complete in itself, functioning according to the interplay between (righteous) and (rasha , wicked), contraries within the legal system, according to which they exclude one another. 19 In their juxtaposition in this half-verse, they therefore serve to cancel one another out, and consequently also the whole legal system, which depends on this distinction for its proper functioning. If this first half-verse, then, represents the dissolution of the legal system, the second, in particular (as something new in relation to it), can only represent that which is left over after its dissolution — that which has 'fallen out' in the course of its disintegration." (I am perfect, or literally, I-perfect) is that which is beyond the legal system. Hence is distinguished from as that which denotes the perfection or integrity of Job that is beyond the law in all its arbitrariness and futility — a 'righteousness' that is no longer undermined by the contradiction Job has uncovered, as was On the other hand, if emphasis is laid on the parallelism between the two half-verses, the (if) at the beginning of the verse being understood to work for both halves, then functions most naturally as a synonym for , and hence is equally implicated in the legal sphere. ! That the distinction between the two terms cannot be maintained unambiguously is confirmed by v. 22b: 'he destroys both the perfect and the wicked', in which is grouped with as its contrary within the legal system that the verse serves once more to undermine. In this way, the distinction between and , that which is beyond the law and that which is defined within it, is seen 18. 9.20 according to DRiVKR-GRAY's translation; 9.21 following HABKL, and 9.22 following the RSV (but translating as 'perfect' throughout). 19. Cf. DRIVER-GRAY, who interpret v. 20a in the light of Deut. 25.1. 20. Cf. GOOD: 'The thing has slipped out, then, in the midst of a very emotional outburst. Job thinks himself "perfect"... [The] impossibility of a fair trial, as Job has come to conceive it, leads him to set himself up as ' (p. 225). 21. So CLINKS, wrho understands the whole verse to function within the lawsuit setting. The break is then between v. 20 and v. 21, the latter's 'unusual staccato rhythm of three twobeat phrases [suggesting] the intensity of Job's emotions' (p. 236). In this way, v. 21 a could be understood as that which 'falls out' in the course of the disintegration of the law in v. 20. of v. 20 (as within the law) is thus distinguished from of v. 21 (as beyond the law), displaying (to anticipate) the shiftability of the word

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also to be a distinction within itself. The 'shiftability' of the term here is of the essence. It is as if Job is using as that which is at the central point of the system, to unplug from that system. Job can only point beyond the system by defining this transcendence in respect of that which is being transcended. It might be necessary to stop here in order to explain more fully what is at issue in this 'shiftability' of the word . Job has the task of distinguishing between his integrity as defined by the legal system and an integrity he has beyond this, which cannot be captured by it. How, then, should he denote this deeper integrity? Supposing Job were to pick another word, one which apparently did not also inhabit the legal sphere. This would allow him to distinguish the two forms of integrity by means of the distinction between two different words, one legal and one not. As such, he would actually be attempting to construct a non-legal language. But by capturing his integrity in this new word, would he not simply be defining his integrity in terms of another role, distinguished from the role the friends prescribed him, but no less prescriptive? As such, would not the distinction between these roles function in the same way as any distinction made within the law? In other words, would not the distinction between legal and non-legal languages be assimilable within the terms of the law itself? This is really saying that there is no language other than the legal, legal being understood in the very broad sense here of the 'socio-symbolic'. The distinction between the two forms of integrity is thus an extra-linguistic distinction, i.e. cannot be made within language. Thus it is not a matter of choosing this word or that to denote Job's deeper integrity, but of setting up the right relation between the legal and extralegal, which linguistically can only be done from within the legal. More specifically, the legal points to the extra-legal in the course of its own collapse: , as a deeper form of integrity, remains after the legal terms and cancel each other out. In other words, Job's deeper integrity cannot be defined or described, but can only be encountered in a continual wrestling with the law. On a larger scale, this is precisely the logic of the relation between Job's and that of the friends. For in order to establish a right relation to the face of God, Job could not simply jump out of the friends' activity of , but had to transform this from within — by a rigorization of the legal metaphor in a challenging of God: the 'mock trial' of chapter 9. He could not escape the arbitrary violence at the root of both their arguments and the law, but had rather to expose this, driving the contradiction involved in the friends' arguments to its logical extreme. Job's discovery of his is the result of this exposure: his insight in 9.20b, 'I am perfect,' follows the collapse of the law in 9.20a, a collapse which is engendered by and reveals the arbitrariness at the base of the law. But this leaves us with the following question: How does this discovery represent a rehabilitation of the friends' ? Or rather, how does this implicate Job in a relation to the face of God? The clue to this lies in 9.20b, which reads ('I am perfect; and he declares me crooked!'). If this half-verse is understood in its distinction from the first half-verse and thus as operating 'beyond' the sphere

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of the legal system, fyqash, make crooked) cannot be a pronouncement that functions within the legal system, but is rather a result of the collapse of this in 9.20a, a collapse brought about by and exposing the arbitrariness at the base of this system. can therefore only be a pronouncement made by this arbitrariness of the legal system as a whole, or indeed the arbitrary power of God that stands at its base. And if this pronouncement disrupts the system as a whole, it cannot be made upon one who gains his full identity from within it, but rather on one who has an identity or self beyond it. It is this self that is described here as . And as such, it is a self that in some way corresponds to the arbitrariness or transcendence of God, which pronounces upon it." Could we add further that it is a self that comes before the face of God? We saw earlier that the face of God was something that could only be met in its hiddenness and obscurity, and further that this hiddenness was experienced as the of existence in all its terror and perplexity, shattering the trusted order of things. But this is precisely what is met in the arbitrariness of the law — a transcendence of God that serves only to confound and confront one as enemy (cf. 9.13, 17—18, culminating in in v. 20b, and further in , destroy, in v. 22b). But this suggests that it is the collapsing of the law and the laying bare of the arbitrariness at its root that in fact brings Job to an encounter with the face of God — even if this face presents itself here as the arbitrary face of the law. And this would explain how Job's 'mock trial' functions as his own appropriation of the friends' 3 The Trajectory of Job's In chapter 9, although Job reaches a powerful insight into his HOP (fummaB) beyond the law, this insight remains incipient: his has as yet no specific content. By chapter 31, however, this insight has developed to a point at which Job can offer an account of his in concrete, fleshed-out terms. According to M.B. Dick, this chapter is the place where use of the legal metaphor in the book of Job reaches its zenith: in Job's official appeal for a judicial hearing (31.35). ~ In relation to the 'mock trial' in chapter 9, this is the real thing, where Job sets his challenge before God: 'let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity ( )' (31.6). What, then, are the dynamics of his ? Job conceives of it in social terms — in his relations to other women (w. 9—12), to his slaves (w. 13—15), to the poor and underprivileged (w. 16—23), to wealth and other potential idols (w. 24—28), to the land (w. 38—40) etc. However, he does so in such hyperbolic terms, 22. Cf. HABHL: '[Job's] innocence is an intolerable burden since he has no way of bringing his case to justice' (p. 194). 23. 'Job 31', CBQ 41. Dick's translation of 31.35 runs: 'If only I had someone to give me a hearing ( )! Here is my mark! Let Shaddai answer me! Let my opponent i ) write out an indictment' (p. 47). This petition for a trial is accompanied by a sworn statement of innocence, which constitutes the whole chapter that culminates in this

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calling correspondingly graphic curses down upon himself, that the integrity therein described breaks the bounds of the law to which it conforms: what Job has described in terms of a legal integrity cannot be contained within this same law. Underlying this hyperbole is the 'shiftability' of the term . Job has no other option but to describe his integrity in legal terms; there is no other language available to him. He must do so, then, in such a way that the legal points beyond itself. It is for this reason, and not because Job is deluded or arrogant in respect of his own righteousness, that the resulting picture is one of inconceivable saintliness. How does Job get from chapter 9, his incipient conception of his integrity, to this filled-out and developed picture of chapter 31? On this trajectory chapter 24 might be regarded as a turning-point for Job. It is at this point that he begins to see his calamity in the context of a whole, complex social nexus of wickedness, suffering and victimhood. He no longer experiences himself, as in chapter 3, as the only nub of reality, all else being obliterated in his allconsuming pain. This pain is something shared by others and is bound up in larger realities of which Job is a part. Job comes to this realization in large part through his changing relation to his friends and their or argument. We have already seen how Job moved from a complete rejection of to his own rehabilitation of the friends' in chapter 9. In order to express his integrity he had to engage in legal discourse. He could no longer regard himself in a vacuum, denying his implicatedness, even in his extreme affliction, in the wider socio-symbolic system. To cut himself off from society would not do justice to his belief in his own integrity and desire for vindication. However, the legal system of chapter 9 has no more than a fictional reality, collapsing as it is constructed, leaving Job once more alone with his own integrity. Job has still not recognized anything truly external to this. His friends are experienced as no more than a nuisance and his speeches read more like soliloquies than part of a dialogue, in which he turns after a brief nod in their direction to that which really concerns him (cf. 6.2f£, 9.2ff., 16.2f£). In chapter 13 his friends play a greater part, being characterized by Job as corrupt and useless advocates for God, but their is still only the backdrop against which Job constructs his own, genuine in his trial against God. It is only in chapter 19 that Job turns on the friends in most vehement accusation (19.2-7):

24. Cf. Dick, 'Job 31', p. 47. 25. Cf. Gutierrez, who regards this chapter as pivotal within the book (On Job, pp. 31-34). Indeed, it might be this insight into the wider context of his suffering that leads Job to his apparent espousal of the friends' doctine in 27.7—23 (if this is not to be regarded as falsely put in the mouth of Job), in an otherwise inexplicable reversal of what he has so far claimed. On this view, it functions as a cry for justice in the conviction that God is ultimately just. Just as Job himself will ultimately be vindicated (19.25—27), so will the unjust victims of society in the face of the wicked.

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How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? And even if it is true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. If indeed you magnify yourselves against me, and make my humiliation an argument against me, Know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net around me. Behold, I cry out, 'Violence!' but I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice.

Here the friends' treatment of Job is described in similar terms to Job's earlier depictions of his affliction by God (c£_ e.g. 6.4f., 9.17-18, 16.9E). Furthermore, the verb Job uses in v. 2 i , to crush, break in pieces) is that which Eliphaz uses of God's treatment of the wicked (5.4). In other words, it is not just God who afflicts Job, treating him as one of the wicked; the friends are implicated in his pain as well. In their his 'humiliation' becomes an indication of his wickedness (v. 5). Job's suffering, in other words, is bound up in the world of meaning he shares with his friends, where suffering and sin are inseparable. His accusation of God is dependent on this shared world of meaning. The shared reality in which Job, too, participates is more than conceptual, however. The friends' , as a social reality, is also a physical reality. Job's humiliation ), whatever else it involves, includes within its purview his physical affliction with disease. Indeed, j meaning literally 'condition of shame', invariably has a concrete reference, e.g. in Ezek. 36.30 to hunger, in Gen. 34.14 to ritual uncircumcision and 2 Sam. 13.13 to sexual shame. ' And at the end of the chapter, Job turns again to his friends: 'Why do you, like God, pursue me, never satisfied with my flesh ( >'? Although this expression most likely derives from the Akkadian and Arabic expression, 'to eat the flesh, or fragments, of someone', meaning 'to calumniate or accuse', its graphical physical reference cannot be overlooked. The friends' accusations of Job are not just intellectual; they implicate his very physical existence. 26. BOB, pp. 357-58. 27. DRIVER-GRAY, CLINKS.

28. Cf. CLINES, 'It goes without saying that the more concrete image of being devoured is still visible' (pp. 454-55). 29. The book of Job is full of often extremely graphic, physical language. Not only does Job's affliction by God as described in the prologue have a literally physical dimension, but Job's language in the poem is saturated with physical images describing his bodily suffering. How are we to understand this? Some have tried to reach a diagnosis of Job's disease by following all the clues in the text. E.g. POPE on 16.16, who finds a description of the symptoms of leprosy. This is obviously far too literalist, missing the fluid metaphorical nature of the language as well as other dimensions of wordplay within the text. However, it

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The dynamics of this are captured well in 16.8: 'And he has shrivelled me up, which is a witness ) against me; my gauntness x ) has risen up 30 against me and it testifies ( ) against me (lit. to my face, f.' Job's physical reality, as an object within the external world he shares with his friends (an inescapably legal world as the terminology indicates), is a sign ( , W) within this world of his sin. It is something he can no longer recognize as his own, something independent of him which can be exploited and used 'against him' in ways beyond his control. But it is nevertheless his own body, as the more personal description of 16.16 conveys: 'My face is red with weeping, and deep darkness ) is on my eyelids ) V l This alludes to and reconfigures elements of chapter 3, where Job asked that 'gloom and deep darkness claim it [the night of his conception]' (3.5a) and that 'it may not see the eyelids ( i of the morning' (3.9c). In 16.16 this same deep darkness comes to rest on Job's own eyelids. Job has moved from an impersonal conception of the all-consuming void of his pain (represented by the day of his birth and the night of his conception) to an intimate experience of his own physicality. But as we see in 16.8, this intimacy in which Job's body is inalienably his own, is inevitably problematized as Job's body is caught up in the impersonal and hostile dynamics of the law. Job's physicality, in other words, participates in the same duality that we discovered his to be implicated in: as a sign within the legal system on the one hand, and as irreducible to this legality on the other — as Job's own body. It is this second construal that Job pits against the friends' in chapter 19: 'And even if it is true that I have erred, my error remains with myself (v. 4), reinterpreting his humiliation as a 'sign' of the

will not do to divest the language of all physical reference. CLINES captures well the holistic nature of Hebrew thought: 'fatness signifies prosperity which in turn signifies divine pleasure' (p. 382). The reference to Job's pain, in other words, may well have a literal dimension, but it always already connotes more than this. The body is an index of spiritual health: 'There is no soundness in my flesh ( ) because of thy indignation; there is no health in my bones because of my sin' (Ps. 38.3[4]). Even more telling is the use of the phrase that describes the Satan's affliction of Job in 2.7 to denote the moral sickness of Israel: 'Why will you still be smitten, that you continue to rebel? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness i ) in it, but bruises and sores and bleeding wounds' (Isa. 1.5—6 cf. Deut. 28.35). Conversely, the use of (from the root tamam) in these physical metaphors suggests that Job's in 1.1, 8 may also have the connotation of physical soundness. This would certainly fit in with a holistic picture, as well as anticipate his subsequent affliction. In keeping with the physical connotations of the root (cf. n. 17) furthermore, Job's integrity in the poem, as we are beginning to discover, has an inescapable physical dimension. 30. Cf. Ps. 109.24—25: 'My knees are weak through fasting; my body has become gaunt ( J . I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they wag their heads.' 31. Because of POPE'S understanding of this verse in a purely physical sense, he misses the wider resonance of the term in the book of Job, and in particular the allusion to chapter 3.

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failure and arbitrariness of the law: 'Behold, I cry out, "Violence!" but I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice' (19.17). Job's realization of his implicatedness in the shared physical and social reality of the friends' , brought to definitive expression in his vehement accusation of the friends at the beginning of chapter 19, leads him for the first time to an extended description of his affliction in its social dimensions, in the second part of chapter 19. It is here that the fictional legal system of chapter 9 gains flesh and blood. In 19.16, Job recounts, 'I call i ) to my servant, but he gives me no answer (); I must beseech him with my mouth.' The verbal resonance with 9.15—16 is unmistakable: 'Though I am righteous, I cannot answer him ; I must appeal for mercy (or beseech, ) to my accuser. If I summoned him and he answered me ( ), I would not believe that he was listening to my voice.' Job's relation to God has now gained social embodiment. Key in this description is the word (%ar, estranged, alien, other) in w. 13, 15 and 17. Job's alienation from his family and acquaintances involves him in a complex relation to them/ " On the one hand, by equating his suffering with sin, they reinforce the arbitrary verdict of the law, which makes him into a sinner without a hearing, i.e. by the weight of its own corruptness. They hold him in the state of 'sovereign exception', excluded from the normal practices of the law. On the other hand, they only reach such an interpretation of Job's suffering as sin on the basis of his sign-value within the system. Job's exclusion is, in other words, at the same time his subsumption or reinscription within the legal system/ " They thereby attempt to capture his true otherness from them — his enigmatic presence as one who cannot be explained by the law — in a relation of external opposition within the legal system. But the dual nature of this otherness is rooted in a duality within Job himself: his existence as a member of society and his irreducibility to this membership. This corresponds, moreover, to the duality of Job's — his integrity within the law and his integrity beyond it. But for this reason, Job's enigmatic otherness from his family and acquaintances is also that which is most other to Job: even as one who has been relegated to its margins, he is still bound by the rules of society; his deeper integrity beyond the law is 32. Cf. DR1VHR-GRAY on v. 15: a stranger or alien ( ) is 'properly one who belongs to another family, class, or community . . . the tables are now so completely turned that the very persons who owed their places in the household to Job now look upon him as one outside the family' (p. 167). 33. According to GOOD, chapter 19 revolves around 'images of distance and closeness, of travel and staying at home'. Describing the transition between w. 13—19 and w. 20—22, he continues, '[the] distance of which Job complains is suddenly replaced by three images of unbearable closeness' (p. 256). As we have seen, Job's exclusion by his friends and relatives is also an encroachment upon his most intimate self. The friends' while holding him at a distance, implicates his whole being. God's 'touching' ) of Job in v. 21, furthermore, alludes to God's affliction of Job in the prologue (1.11, 2.5).

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therefore something which remains enigmatic to him, even as that which is most inalienable from him. As we have seen, he can only give expression to it in legal terms, pointing to it without being able to capture it. As this enigmatic 34 inalienable presence, it is his internal otherness^ Finally, Job's dawning appreciation of his existence in a flesh-and-blood legal system, not just the fictive construction of chapter 9, brings him to the who, in contrast to the non-existent vision of a flesh-and-blood in 9.33, will act as his vindicator (19.25f.): 25

For I know that my Redeemer ( ) lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26a and after my skin has been thus destroyed, 26b

27 26b

then from (within or without?) my flesh I shall behold God whom I shall behold on my side, 35 and my eyes shall see to be unestranged.

27

Rather than going into all the complexities of this passage, which is much contested, I will single out some factors worth noting in the context of the trajectory along which we have followed Job's development. In contrast to his family and acquaintances,, from whom Job was estranged i , Job experiences God as (lo^-^ar), unestranged. In chapter 9 God was for Job simply the arbitrary violence at the base of the law, a law which collapsed under the weight of this arbitrariness. By this point in chapter 19, however, Job has reached a better-differentiated understanding of the legal system and his inescapable membership in it. In relation to this, he recognizes the highly enigmatic nature of his own deeper integrity. And it is as bound up with the latter that he now experiences God, who as the arbitrary face of the law is also the guarantor of Job's integrity beyond the law. Moreover, both the verbs used here, (to behold, w. 26b and 27a) and (to see, v. 27b), are often connected with a vision of God's face. Cf. Ps. 11.7b: ('and the upright shall behold his face'); and Ps. 17.15a: (cas for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness'); and foi e.g. Exod. 33.20; Gen. 32.30 and Judg. 6.22. This confirms Job's vision here to be the climactic and complexifying 34. Cf. pp. 83-85. 35. Instead of the other grammatically possible reading for 27b, '[whom] my eyes and not another's (shall see)' (with DRIVER-GRAY, POPE; contra CLINKS, HABKL, GOOD). This choice will gain its justification in the overall interpretation offered here. In brief, however, principally at stake is Job's re-envisaging of his relation to God as this has been made possible by the development of his thought up to this point, and not, for instance, the question of whether he will be alive at the scene of his vindication (contra CLINES). So DRIVER-GRAY, 'Job is ... interested in ... the aspect under which he will see God — God once more his friend' (p. 175).

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embodiment of his relation to the face of God as outlined above. The ethical dimension of Pss. 11.7 and 17.15 bears out the fundamentally of Job's integrity for this relation (cf. Job 1.1, where and ._ are used in parallel, and 9.20 where and appear together); ' (tarn-am^ I am perfect, or literally I-perfect) in 9.20 has become simply (#///, I, 19.27a). And this is defined in its relation to God. In other words, Job has plumbed the depths of his integrity and found God there at the heart of it. God is discovered to be, not just the arbitrary face of the law, but even more 37 fundamentally, the face of Job's integrity/ Further, Job's vision of God implicates his flesh, (basar, v. 26b). It was his flesh that the friends pursued in 19.22, their involving not just a shared social reality, but a shared physical reality as well. It is this Job of flesh and blood that meets God, his in 19.25f. If the in v. 26b is understood to mean 'from within', then we might construe the verse as conveying Job's experience of God as bound up with his basic physical irreducibility. If, however, (min) is translated 'away from', then the verse may be understood as an expression of God's transcendence of Job's legal bodily identity. The duality of Job's body allows for this double construal, preserving both senses of ( However, in line with the movement of Job's development as a whole (from his contemplation of a fictional legal system and to one of flesh and blood), I prefer to render 'from within': Job in his flesh-and-blood existence (in contrast to the abstract pain expressed in chapter 3). To sum up, Job's has brought him into this intimate relation to the face of God — to a vision in which God is How is God's action as to be understood? God as fe^) arises i , qum) upon the earth — implicitly as a witness/ At this point one expects testimony to follow. But no speech follows, only the manifest relation between Job and God. Is it possible, however, that such a relation is itself the testimony? If so, God's action as is to maintain Job's in this relation. But this is a funny sort of testimony, for it has no specific content. It would appear not to be a statement made within the parameters of the law, but rather a judgment in 36. Cf. DRIVKR-GRAY: 'Job thus, even in this phrase [v. 26b], implies his conviction that he will see God recognizing his integrity' (p. 174). 37. If this is the fundamental import of Job's vision here, then debates concerning whether or not it implies a belief in the afterlife somewhat miss the point (see GUNKS, pp. 463f., for a discussion of the various views on this matter). Instead, expressions such as 'at the last' (v. 25b) and 'after my skin has been thus destroyed' (v. 26a), rather than temporally placing the scene of vindication, serve to bring out the ultimacy of Job's integrity and God's establishment of it: this election is more fundamental than the arbitrariness displayed in chapters 9f. Cf. DR1VF.R-GRAY: 'the movement in the direction of a belief in a future which is here found is rather in response to the conviction that communion with God is real' (p. 172). 38. Cf. HABKL, who holds this motif of 'flesh' to be thematically significant in the climax of Job's speech here (p. 302). 39. For the legal connotations of the verb see p. 133 above.

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relation to the law as a whole^ pronouncing Job to be one of integrity. This forms the counterpart of 9.21: CI am perfect; and he declares me crooked!', in which God in his arbitrary transcendence of the law pronounced Job wretched. Against this, God as argues for Job's integrity.

4 The

as the One who Reminds God of his Election

It is in this knowledge that Job is able to mount his trial in chapter 31. The legal system is no longer a construction of his imagination, but a social reality. Job's is no longer a fiction but a living reality. And Job's , still amorphous in chapter 9, has as concrete a reality as the social system it transcends. It is this reality of his that Job brings to expression in chapter 31, as the argument against the very God that upholds it. But what does this mean for Job's role as Job's exploration and probing of the 'for naught' of God would seem in the light of the above to be his persistent probing of his own integrity along the trajectory I have outlined here, arriving at an understanding of this as his own internal otherness in inextricable relation to the otherness of God. In this persistence in his integrity (cf. 2.3c), Job reaches an understanding of God, beyond the arbitrary face of the law, as one who correspondingly persists in upholding Job's integrity. And — insofar as God's establishing and upholding of Job's integrity is in fact none other than his election of Job — this is to begin to understand God as one who elects. Could it then be the case that Job's persistent probing of his integrity, an integrity inextricably bound up with his election by God, has its purpose in reminding God of this election — that this is Job's role as We are reminded here of Moses' enactment of the role of the in the episode of the Golden Calf (Exod. 32). The Lord says to Moses: 'Go down; for your people, whom you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves' (v. 7). And Moses responds: CO Lord, why does thy wrath burn hot against thy people, whom thou has brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a might hand? ... Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants ...' (w. 11—13). And finally 'the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people' (v. 14). Jeremiah, too, employs this strategy of reminding God of his election in response to God's apparent disowning of his people: CO thou hope of Israel, its saviour in time of trouble, why shouldst thou be like a stranger in the land, like a wayfarer who turns aside to tarry for a night? Why shouldst thou be like a man confused, like a mighty man who cannot save? Yet thou, O lord, art in the midst of us, and we are called by thy name; leave us not' (14.8—9).

40. I.e. the activity of self-examination, in the language of the previous chapters. 41. See Muffs, Low, p. 12.

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In Job's case, this persistent reminding results in the irresistible and shattering eruption of the Whirlwind speeches. More powerful an effect Job could not have hoped for. Even as they express Job's own insight, it is surely also in them that Job most intensely and overwhelmingly experiences the arm of the Lord. While we may meet in the book of Job a transcendent God whose arbitrary power is unamenable to our own plans and designs, a God in relation to whom there can be no we are nevertheless dealing with a God who is most intimately involved in his creation — indeed, with a God who has made room for a within himself. In the Whirlwind speeches we discover that Job's trial was from the beginning encompassed within the greater trial already taking place within God; that Job's wrestling was preceded by and included within God's own wrestling with and for him. This is the extent of God's engagement with Job — which assures us that Job's arguing was not in vain.

5 Conclusion The translation, carried out here in Part III, of Chapter 4 into the Hebraic Joban idiom has involved the development of an understanding of Job as one who calls God to account. In the course of Chapter 5 we came to understand this as his probing of God's 'for naught' relation to creation. Job's challenging of God's arbitrary authority is at the same time his critical investigation of the deeper dimension of the Covenant, which we have discovered to be God's election of creation for naught. And in Chapter 6, we found Job's probing of God's 'for naught' ultimately to consist in his probing of his own integrity. We have, in other words, come full circle: it was precisely an understanding of Job as one who probes his integrity that we reached in Chapter 4. But in this case, Chapter 4 and Part III are mutually illuminating: not only must the one who calls God to account be understood as the one who probes his integrity, but the one who probes his integrity must be understood as the one who calls God to account. These depictions may not be reducible to one another, just as the Hebraic Joban idiom cannot be reduced to the psycho-philosophical discourse of Chapter 4, but they together capture two inextricable sides of Job's activity within the poem — in his relation to himself (and the otherness he discovers at the heart of himself) and in his relation to God. And both of these, in turn, are to be understood in the context of the wider world expounded in Chapter 3 — that of the prose narrative. Just as in Chapter 4 the disruption undergone by Job had to be understood as the disruption and transformation of Job's society, so here must Job's enactment of the role of the , as one who calls God to account, be understood within the greater context of the prose narrative as that which brings about justice within Job's wider society. Job's wrestling with God not only restores right relations between himself and God, but enables him to act as intercessor between God and the friends, bringing them also into right relations with one another.

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Part IV The Disruption and Transformation of the Self

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7 The Problem of Obedience Revisited

We have spent the last four chapters in close engagement with the text of Job, tracing its contours in an attempt to do at least some justice to its particularity. This involved the learning of several new languages: that of the prose narrative, Job's external world, whose 'false naivety' required for its deciphering a long intrascriptural detour, and in particular a familiarity with the Deuteronomic Covenant; that of Job's internal world, for whose description I drew upon psycho-philosophical discourse; and finally that of Job's legal undertakings with its background in Israel's prophetically mediated relation to God. All this has taken us some way from the theologicalconceptual framework within which we began. The purpose of the present chapter is to examine the theological implications of the intervening chapters: having submitted it to the rigours of the text, how are we required to reenvisage the theological conceptuality of the opening chapters? The problem with Earth's theological conceptuality, as we discovered in our analysis of his interpretation of Job, was its inability to do justice to the historical, social and psychological dimensions of the text. More specifically, Barth was unable to give an account of the full human complexity of Job's obedience. My interpretation has been geared towards an exploration of precisely those dimensions of the text that Barth left unexplored, in an attempt to give a fuller and richer account of Job's obedience, which I have meanwhile come to talk about as his 'integrity' or 'for naught relation to God'. This concluding theological reflection constitutes, therefore, the emergence of an alternative theological conceptuality to Barth's, and thereby an answer to the problem of obedience we discovered within Barth's theology — a problem, I contend, which is not only found in Barth.

1 Re-Envisaging the Theological Field For Barth, to recall, historical reality was the sphere of falsehood. In this sphere the freedom of God and the freedom of the human being are denied by way of a coordination and systematization of their properly asymmetrical relation. This is nothing other than a distortion of their eschatological reality; there is no place, in other words, for eschatological reality within history. Instead, eschatological reality must be veiled within historical reality if it is to become manifest within it. It is within this structure of veiling and unveiling

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that the problem of obedience arises: on the one hand, the distinction between obedience, as an eschatological quality, and disobedience, as characteristic of historical reality, cannot be reduced to a distinction within historical or phenomenal reality. Any such phenomenal distinction is relativized by the uncrossable gulf between eschatological and historical reality, which reveals the whole of history to be a distortion. On the other hand, if eschatological reality is to become manifest within history, giving rise to a form of obedience appropriate to the historical sphere, then the distinction between obedience and disobedience must have a phenomenal dimension. Without this, no genuine unveiling can be said to have taken place, and thus no genuine veiling either. So on the one hand, no phenomenal distinction between obedience and disobedience is possible. But on the other, such a distinction must be made. Crucial to this theological set-up, as we will discover, is the fact that historical or phenomenal reality is understood to be exhausted in the systematization of the relation between God and humanity that occurs within it. In other words, the brittle ideological web of falsehood that results constitutes, for Barth, the whole of phenomenal reality. It is no surprise, then, that eschatological reality can only be veiled within it — that it can have no properly phenomenal dimension. Leaving this observation to one side for a moment, we may recall Barth's 'solution'. Job's complaint in the dialogue is structured, from an immanent perspective, according to the dialectic of Job's simultaneous right and wrong. On the one hand, Job complains that God does not conform to his own preconceptions of who God is, and is thus in the wrong. On the other hand, he thereby admits that God is present to him in the alien form of an enemy, thus attesting God's freedom to take this form, and is hence in the right. From an immanent perspective, i.e. historically, this dialectic remains an irresolvable stalemate. It is only insofar as God in his freedom is in fact present to Job even in this alien form that Job is constituted ultimately as in the right — that his integrity or identity as the servant of God is upheld. And this free act of God's becoming present to Job is eschatological. There does exist, then, a phenomenal distinction between Job's obedience and the friends' disobedience: Job complains while the friends do not. However, it is not this but God's eschatological act of becoming present to Job which constitutes the presence of the eschatological within the historical, the new within the old. The phenomenal distinction can only witness to this presence. In this way, the presence of the eschatological within the historical, or the transformation of the old into the new, gives rise to a distinction within the old without being reducible to it. Conversely, Job's dialectic may be said to have the 'critical delimiting function' of leaving room for the eschatological possibility of God's becoming present. It does not constitute or manifest this presence (or Job's resultant obedience) in and of itself. But for this reason, Job's eschatological being — his identity as the servant or elect of God — remains a purely eschatological reality, 'identified' with

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the historical Job of the dialogue only in God's eschatological act. The historical dialectic, by leaving room for it in this way, can only witness to it. It cannot give it a truly historical manifestation, for the identification remains hidden from the historical perspective. In other words, Job's eschatological being — his identity as elected by God - has no properly phenomenal dimension. My interpretation of Job has, as we will discover, effected a subtle but significant shifting of the boundaries within this theological set-up. First, as a matter of continuity, Earth's brittle ideological web of falsehood has become the socio-symbolic system of the friends, in which Job is also naturally implicated. The systematization of God carried out by Earth's friends is analogous to the systematization of the law in the doctrine of retribution carried out by the friends in my interpretation. Just as the former deny God's freedom, so do the latter deny the sovereign exception — God's arbitrary violence. Again, just as the former deny Job's freedom, so do the latter deny Job's singularity by attempting to reinscribe him within the socio-symbolic system. Moreover, falsehood is not limited in Earth's interpretation to the friends, but is the structure of the reality they inhabit in its entirety. This is borne out by the fact that Job, too, cannot help but systematize God, complaining that he does not conform to his preconceptions. He, too, is put in the wrong. Equally in my interpretation, the socio-symbolic system is not just a construct of the friends, but a reality in which Job, too, exists. His arguments against God are carried out on the basis of the law. These are his only terms of argument. However, there emerges within the parameters of my interpretation something that was not present in Earth's: a reality beyond and beneath the socio-symbolic web which is nevertheless intimately and inextricably bound up with it. We came to describe this reality in several different ways: as the surplus animation generated by the system; as Job's singularity; as the violence at the base of the law; as Job's deeper integrity; as God's election of Job; as the 'more' of the Covenant; as other creaturely singulars. For Earth, as I have already intimated, the ideological web inhabited by Job and the friends alike is the whole of historical and phenomenal reality. In my interpretation, by contrast, a deeper dimension of historical creation is discovered, one which breaks the bounds of this structure. These depths, moreover, themselves bear the marks of the eschatological. Just as Earth's brittle web could not contain Job's eschatological being, nor can the socio-symbolic system contain Job's singularity Consequently, the latter, like the former, can only be given dialectical expression within the ideological structures of creation. Unlike Job's eschatological being in Earth's interpretation, however, Job's singularity is something inextricably bound up with these ideological structures. It emerges as a surplus in relation to them, and so can only exist within their parameters. The socio-symbolic system, or law, therefore, has positive connotations that Earth's brittle web lacks. It is the necessary human matrix within which the depths of creation emerge.

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Job's singularity is, then, at once eschatological and historical. This is the crux of the answer to the problem of obedience that I offer in the light of my interpretation. It consists in the breaking down of the sharp distinction between the eschatological (noumenal) and the historical (phenomenal) that plagued Earth's theology — by way of the construction of a mixed category. This dispenses with the need to posit a veiled identity between the eschatological and historical — between Job's identity as elected by God and his historical being. Indeed, the whole problematic of the necessity and simultaneous impossibility of a phenomenal understanding of obedience is undermined from the start: for this only arose out of the absolute and uncompromising division between the eschatological and the historical. Once this division has been undermined, it is no longer a matter of witnessing from within history to that which lies beyond it, but instead of an exploration within history of the depths to history that simultaneously exceed and break out of its structures. The nature of this exploration will be unfolded in what follows. 2 The Mixed Category of the Self This blurring of the boundaries between the historical and the eschatological requires that we work with a 'mixed category' to describe the depths of creation that participate in both. We have continued from the previous chapters to talk about these depths in terms of Job's singularity, understanding this in its complex relation to the law, to God's arbitrariness at the base of the law, to God's election of Job, and to the singularity of other creatures. Most fundamentally, however, this mixed dimension of creation may be understood in terms of selfhood. What Job gains within the parameters of the socio-symbolic system is an identity, or several identities, none of which gets to the bottom of who he is. Who he is is at once prior to, arises out of, and exceeds these shifting identities. This is his self; and his singularity is the depths of this self as it refuses to be captured in any of its sociosymbolic or historical identities. In its relation to these, Job's self is at once historical and eschatological — in ways which can only be specified in relation to the findings of my interpretation, which I will now take time to recall. Job's complaint begins in an experience of himself as remainder (ch. 3). At this point nothing exists for him other than this painful abyss of self. In the course of the dialogue, this experience gains layer after layer of conceptualization, a process which is informed and driven by the dialectic of Job's wretchedness and integrity. At the heart of this process is Job's relation to the law: his wretchedness is the result of his exposure to the arbitrariness at the base of the law, and his integrity his defiance in the face of this perversion of justice, expressed as a claim on God at its root. The complex concept of self that develops corresponds at each stage to different conceptualizations of the Other: God as enemy and friend; the system of the law; its social and physical embodiment in the world of the friends. But Job's

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integrity remains throughout this inward-probing dialectic the touchstone — the fundamental reality to which everything else is related. It is only in the Whirlwind speeches that this integrity conceived as the All is itself decentred and relinquished: the disruption to which Job has subjected the law, in an exposure of its ultimate corruption, is itself disrupted. Job's existence beyond the law, his deeper integrity, has been construed by Job up to this point as his claim on an unjust and arbitrary God. But this same integrity is his nature as chosen by God for naught. In its deeper probing, then, Job ultimately comes up against the election by God in which it is rooted — God's radical precedence over Job in the gratuity7 of his creation ex nihilo. This truth is embodied and made manifest in the multitude of creaturely singulars whose existence is the utter gratuity of God's creation — which defies Job's legal claim. In other words, these singulars explode the monological All into which Job had attempted to contract them. In this explosion, moreover, we discover these creaturely others all along to have been the driving force of Job's inward-probing dialectic. While they eclipse Job's singularity, they also call it into being, placing him before the fundamental truth of his election. For this reason, while they disrupt Job's dialectic, they also send him back into it: only in this way can Job give expression to the perception of integrity embodied but eclipsed in the Whirlwind speeches. What might we glean from this about the status of Job's self as both historical and eschatological? What is the nature of the mixed category it requires us to develop for its description? Fundamental to the nature of Job's self is its election by God. And this election precedes its existence as a particular creature, as the covenantal presupposition of God's act of creation. Job's self, in other words, is elected 'for naught', not on the basis of any of its predicates. God's act of election, therefore, is an eternal and eschatological act, giving Job's self an eternal and eschatological determination. In this sense, Job's self transcends the flux of history, having an abiding and perennial existence which cannot be jeopardized by the contingencies of history. On the other hand, the truth of its election gains incontrovertible historical embodiment in the creaturely singulars of the Whirlwind speeches. This is one of the crucial points at which my interpretation of Job most clearly departs from Earth's. For Barth, the Whirlwind speeches were the purely eschatological act of God in which the historical Job of the poem was established in his identity7 as the obedient servant of God, whose pure form we encounter only in the prose narrative. In isolation from this eschatological act, the dialogue is a historical stalemate in which neither Job's obedience nor his disobedience wins out. It is only eschatologically that Job is constituted as ultimately obedient, and therefore only eschatologically that Job exists in his identity as elected by God. This has the effect of entirely removing Job's elected self from the historical plane. In this way, the division between the eschatological and the historical, between the historical Job of the dialogue and the elected Job of the prose narrative, eschatologically identified with one

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another in the Whirlwind speeches, is written into the structure of the book itself. In my interpretation, by contrast, Job's election as established and revealed in the Whirlwind speeches has undeniable historical force. It is only at this point within the trajectory of the book of Job that we discover this force to be that of the untameable and uncircumscribable reality of the creaturely world, but its effects have been felt from the beginning of the poem. It is that which so disturbs the friends in their encounter with Job's unutterable affliction, calling forth excitations in them which they must bind into fantasies. They carry this out by reinscribing Job within the socio-symbolic world with which he has become disjointed, thereby defending themselves against the depths of Job's self which cannot be captured within it. And it is that which Job, by contrast, refuses to domesticate and deny, although he also experiences it as pain, but which he instead persistently plumbs in a rigorous process of selfexamination. In all this, the historical presence of Job's self as that which has been elected by God for naught is evident. However, the ambivalent nature of this presence is such as to suggest simultaneously its eschatological status. It is precisely because it cannot be captured within the socio-symbolic system that it poses such a threat. Hence the need to erect defences against it, which domesticate its unsystematizable nature by means of its forced systematization. In other words, it is 'for naught'. It cannot be placed within any set of coordinated relations. It cannot be ideologized; it can only disrupt these ideologies. This is not to deny that historical creation is ideologically structured through and through — in Barth's terms, characterized by falsehood. That there are depths which break out of these structures does not entail that there is a non-ideological place within creation that can be reached. Rather, one may be taken up in a movement in which any given ideological structure is disrupted. Job's self as 'for naught', in other words, exists precisely as this excess which breaks out of the structures of historical creation. While being fully embodied within history, then, it is nevertheless eschatologically structured. Its uncircumscribable nature is powerfully encountered in Job's opening monologue, in which it is experienced by Job as overwhelming pain: rather than becoming the object of scrutiny, this pain is allowed simply to speak, standing at the source of Job's verbal eruption. Job's fear ( , pachad) in 3.25 acts as a cipher for that which has no name. When Job does begin to conceptualize it, he can only do so by means of the dialectic of his wretchedness and integrity, which is inherently dynamic, its power and intent not descriptive but disruptive. Disrupting first the law, this dialectic leads to its own disruption by the creaturely others of the Whirlwind speeches. Job's self, as the inner momentum of this dialectic, never gains definitional embodiment — it is never unequivocally phenomenal. It is, rather, a force within and beyond the phenomenal world which leads one into intense but disruptive engagement with it. It is present, therefore, not as something that

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appears as it were, but rather as something that makes its presence felt. It is indeed like a 'lack' or abyss over which the socio-symbolic system is constructed. From all this we begin to see how the self is both historical and eschatological, but it has not yet been drawn out what this actually amounts to: what the shape is of the self that emerges. Most significantly, all that has just been said implies that the self cannot be treated as a stable entity with an essence that is ahistorically constituted, lying outside the vicissitudes of history. Rather, the self is through and through historically constituted, arising only within the process of history. It cannot, therefore, be reified, as talk of 'the self misleadingly suggests. As we saw in Chapter 6, Job's (tummah^ integrity) emerged only in the course of the collapse of the law and the exposure of the arbitrary sovereignty at its base. The deeper integrity he discovered beyond the law was only reached through a wrestling with the law. Moreover, this discovery did not allow him to leave the law behind: his deeper , defined only through his legal and its disruption, remained bound up with this disruption. Similarly, the insight of the Whirlwind speeches did not take Job once and for all beyond the dialectic of the dialogue, but led him back into it. Job's self, therefore, exists only within this series of disruptions. This emerges even more clearly in a comparison of Job with the friends. While Job's singularity calls forth corresponding surplus animation within them, this never comes to constitute in their case a deeper integrity They harness it, rather, to reinforce the socio-symbolic system, which genuine integrity can only disrupt. By contrast, characteristic of Job's self as elected by God is its corresponding determination as obedient, as chosen or 'integral'. This is its eschatological shape. And this eschatological integrity is only established in the historical dialectic of the dialogue and its disruption in the Whirlwind speeches. In other words, Job's self as elected by God is constituted, not just by the surplus animation of the socio-symbolic system, which is equally called forth within the friends, but by the relation to the socio-symbolic system in which Job exists. Job's self does not exist outside his relentless critique of this and the inward-probing dialectic that drives it. Expressed aphoristically, Job's self is the process of its probing. In this probing, Job nevertheless reaches a knowledge of his eschatological election. This is the transcendent truth embodied in the Whirlwind speeches and discovered to have been in force all along. Indeed, Job discovers not only his own election but that of creaturely reality as a whole, characterized by its uncontainable gratuity. His own election, bound up with the election of creation, is something that radically precedes and exceeds him. But with this insight it becomes clear that the friends, as part of elected creation, are not only failing to live with the kind of integrity we witness in Job, but in this failure are denying the truth of their own election: in reharnessing the excitations called forth in them by Job's singularity to reinforce the socio-

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symbolic system, they not only distort and domesticate Job's deeper integrity, they distort, domesticate, and ultimately falsify, their own. But this ultimate truth of their existence, as well as that of creation, is not available in the abstract. Job only reaches it within the process of disruption he undergoes. Only by means of his dialectic does he come into encounter with creaturely reality; and only because this encounter is the culmination of his wrestling with the law does the gratuity of creaturely reality appear to him, not as violent brute fact, but as the 'more' of the Covenant. Indeed, we might go as far as to say that outside such encounter creaturely reality is no more than brute fact. This would be to extrapolate from Job's history of disruption and transformation to creaturely reality as a whole; to claim that, as in the case of Job, creation only gains its character as eschatologically elected by God in such historical processes, in its being transformed — a possibility I will return to below. But for now, we are left with the paradoxical formula that Job's discovery of his eschatological election — in which he also discovers the election of the whole of creation — is one with its historical making. Expressed conversely: outside these processes in which he is disrupted and transformed, Job lives outside and against this truth of God's election. 3 The Nature of Job's Obedience: His Tor Naught' Relationship to God What does this tell us about the nature of Job's service of God for naught? How are we, in other words, to answer the Satan's question, 'Does Job fear God for naught?' Earlier we gave this the following interpretation: 'Can Job carry on serving God once the framework within which Job relates to God (i.e. the doctrine of retribution) has been undermined?' In Barthian terms, Is it possible to serve God not on the basis of any preconception of who God is?'1 In his development of a concept of self-examination, upon which I have drawn in my interpretation of Job, Barth conceived of such service of God in terms of a process in which the self and its presuppositions are continually disrupted. From within this process the historical subject bears witness to her eschatological being which has God as its only preconception. However, as we discovered in the case of the disciples in Barth's interpretation of the story of the rich man, this disruption of the historical self is not rooted in anything deeper/ There is only the process of disruption and its witness beyond itself. Ultimately, then, this is no different from the structural set-up in Barth's commentary on Job. In 'leaving room' for the presence of the eschatological, history comes to witness beyond itself. It becomes the veil for 1. Cf p. 57. 2. Cf. pp. 45-46. 3. More specifically, I raised this as a question at the end of my analysis of Barth's commentary on the story of the rich man (p. 43), answering it in the negative only later (pp. 46—48).

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the eschatological. In this way, history as a whole might be transformed from without, in the conferral of an eschatological status on Job or the disciples, but it gains no immanent teleology. This is evident in the process of selfexamination: for although this involves a movement of disruption, because this movement never gets any nearer to the eschatological which lies beyond its reach, it can have no immanent goal or destination. Rather, its service of God consists in the fact that the movement as a whole points beyond itself. In my interpretation, Job's service of God for naught also involves disruption. However, there are some crucial differences. Job's history is not reducible to the bare process of disruption. Job is disrupted, in the first place, by an Other. And this disruption leads to his mind-blowing encounter with this Other in the Whirlwind speeches. This forms a climax to Job's history which gives it a purpose and goal that was lacking in Earth's rendering, thereby lending it a dynamic and teleology. Moreover, this encounter does not come out of nowhere. In the trajectory leading up to it, Job has been engaged with this Other all along. In his wrestling with the law he has been wrestling with the Other. For his critique of the law is nothing less than a critique of the world he shares with the Other — the socio-symbolic system. And this critique reaches is limit and is transcended in the celebration of the Other in the Whirlwind speeches. The disruption Job undergoes is therefore of a particular kind. It is, first, a disruption of his worldly (socio-symbolic) identity by means of critique, and second, a disruption of this critique in a celebration of that which exceeds all critique. It is not simply Job's preconceptions which are disrupted, therefore, but the manner of his engagement with the world. Furthermore, that which Job probes in this process of disruption is more than a historical self with its various preconceptions. In his engagement with the Other, Job exceeds his worldly, historical identity, and his probing leads him deeper and deeper into this excess, which he discovers to be his deeper integrity as one who has been eschatologically elected by God. His 'selfexamination', then, is the examination not of a purely historical self (as in Earth), but of a self which is at once historical and eschatological, emerging in the process of its probing. Indeed, as we discovered above, this process — which is both driven by the eschatological nature of the self and leads to its further probing — is itself what constitutes the self as an eschatological reality. Job's service of God for naught, therefore, is not a matter of witness to that which lies beyond history, but of an exploration within history of the depths of the self. This exploration does not simply witness to, but itself constitutes, Job's relation to God 'for naught'. Does Job thereby achieve a service of God not on the basis of any preconception of who God is? In the light of the above, this no longer seems to be the most appropriate rendering of the Satan's question. We might ask, instead, 'Does Job need the human structures of the law to protect him against the arbitrariness of God at their base?' These worldly structures, in which Job gains his identity, form the 'hedge' that God, according to the Satan, has put around Job (1.9). In the removal of this hedge, in the disruption of Job's

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worldly identity7, and in his exposure to the arbitrary sovereignty of God, will Job come to ruin? Or will he find a way in which he can continue to relate to God? This is much more than a question about preconceptions. It is about the nature of Job's reality and the manner of his engagement with it. Is this reality ultimately a harsh and impersonal reality, exposure to which will crush Job? Or will it be possible for him to reinterpret the arbitrariness of God, by which he is crushed, as the gratuity of election, by which he is upheld? In the course of his inward-probing dialectic, this is indeed what Job discovers. As a result, he is not destroyed by the explosion of the Whirlwind speeches, but enters into a relationship with creation in which his integrity is established on a deeper level. He finds a way of relating to the world, therefore, in which its human structures do not function as a protective hedge (as they do for the friends), but are the framework within which a deeper relation to God becomes possible: a relation to God for naught, or as we can nowr say, in gratitude for the gratuity of God's creation. 4 Obedience as Process: Towards a Historical Ontology We have come to understand Job's obedience as exploration. As we expressed it aphoristically above: Job's self is the process of its probing. But this means that his obedience, sanctification or integrity is best understood, not as primarily about being or becoming anything, nor primarily about doing anything, but as about being transformed. Job's integrity is constituted by his ongoing transformation. This is, of course, not to the exclusion of his being and doing. The Job of the prologue is identified in terms of the law as the most pious man of the East. It is only as such that he is put to the test and subjected to the affliction in which his deeper integrity emerges. Job's deeper integrity, as I have stressed, is inseparable from his identity within the law. And he gains this identity as pious ( , tarn) only by doing the law (1.1—5 substantiates the assertion of Job's piety by describing his daily actions; and chapter 30 gives the most detailed account of Job's piety by describing how he has lived). Nevertheless, Job's integrity exceeds this identity and the pious actions by which it is formed. Its 'for naught' nature cannot be captured within these human structures, but is expressed, rather, in a critique of them which brings Job into engagement with the creaturely others that equally cannot be captured within them, a critique which leads to its own limit in a celebration of these creaturely others. This is the defining shape of Job's integrity: critical engagement erupting in celebration. And in this engagement and encounter with the Other, Job himself is disrupted and transformed. This account of obedience is significant for several reasons. First, it frees us from what can become the debilitating knowledge that we fall short of the law and that we are consequently disqualified from a legal righteousness. For although important, our actions in accordance with the law are not what ultimately constitute our integrity before God. Rather, it is in our grappling with the law and our identities within it that our deeper integrity resides.

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Second, it frees us from the debilitating knowledge of the impurity of our thoughts and desires. In these we might never completely cease to set ourselves over and above our fellow creatures, reducing them to their sociosymbolic identities and thereby making them relative to ourselves (just as Job did in his annihilation of all creaturely reality within his own singularity); but in our committed critique of the world we share with these creatures, we nevertheless come to engage with them in a way which allows their otherness to explode the world (and along with it, the scheme in which we have captured them). The celebration of the Whirlwind speeches, if not a constant state, can nevertheless inform our whole lives, shaping our thoughts and desires even in their impurity. Thus, an inability to overcome sin in our being and action need not be a recipe for despair. Even while still sinful, we may know ourselves as elected by God in his ongoing disruption and transformation of our sinful lives. Obedience is, on the one hand, something that in our being and action — which in one sense constitutes the whole of us — we cannot achieve. But it is not the case that such obedience must therefore be attributed to us only cin faith': that is, in a faith which, on the one hand, works itself out in our lives, but on the other hand, remains something alien to us as those who in and of ourselves cannot escape the sinful structures of humanity. Such a paradox is resolved in my account by appeal to a deeper integrity which does not simply displace and do away with the disobedience in which we continue to live, but which disrupts and transcends it in a process of continual transformation. This process is the killing of our old being and the constitution of our new being: our simultaneous rejection and election. Luther's simuliustus etpeccator'is retained, but not in the Barthian terms of a division between the historical and the eschatological. To recall, Barth says of Job: 'Job — simul iustus et peccator — is right in all his sayings as the servant of Yahweh, and in none of them as fallible man' (IV.3, p. 406). Job, in other words, is elected as the servant of Yahweh and rejected as a fallible human being. But what can this mean other than the election of the eschatological and the rejection of the historical? It is this binary of election and rejection that is overcome in my account. Indeed, this is the implication of the irreducible historicity of Job's eschatological self: it is his historical existence which is both rejected and elected. His election, therefore, is not something which remains aloof from him, saved up for him in eternity but alien to his historical being. As that which emerges out of, and is constituted by, Job's process of probing his integrity, it is also historical reality. This category of probing constitutes the third in relation to the binary of election and rejection, creating a space within which the opposition is mediated — a space which is fundamentally historical. As I will draw out below, it is within this space that 4. This gains another dimension of significance when we recall that for Barth Job is a type of Christ. Without such a notion of history as elected in and with its rejection, can Barth really do justice to the incarnation as God's fundamental affirmation of history?

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Earth's ultimately unidirectional understanding of election and rejection (working themselves out on Job) becomes a bidirectionality in which Job works out God's own electing work in history, searching out God as God searches out him. This, incidentally, mirrors the reciprocity of the language of blessing in the prose narrative. However, it is not only for these more immediate reasons that such an account of obedience is significant. It has, beyond these, implications for the nature of reality itself. As we have seen, the most fundamental way in which God relates to creation is by his election of it for naught. Being for naught, there is nothing that precedes or is more basic than this election. And as our account of Job's integrity has demonstrated, it works itself out in processes of disruption and transformation. But this means — if we are to extrapolate from Job's election to that of creation as a whole — that the most fundamental way in which God relates to creation is in such disruption and transformation. And this would mean that there are no structures of reality that are not subject to disruption. This is consonant with the fact that not only Job but the whole of creation is in the process of being made new: 'the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now...' (Rom. 8.21—22). More basically still, even the most stable creaturely realities are undergoing constant transformation and have their own history? If we are to take this seriously, then, there can be no appeal beyond such disruption to a stable relation between creation and Creator, by virtue of which creation — however problematic its social, psychological etc. structures, however questionable the emergent whole — may be affirmed as fundamentally good. In other words, there is nothing constant and absolute beyond and outside the vicissitudes and turmoil of history. Disruption goes all the way down. As I suggested above, outside such processes of disruption as that undergone by Job, leading to his encounter with creaturely reality, creation is no more than brute fact. Only within the dynamics of election does it become a gratuity to be celebrated — as the 'more' of the Covenant.6 One of the results of all this is that there is no way that Job can bypass the arbitrary and violent God he exposes at the base of the law by recourse to God the 'Creator', whose goodness is constant and unshakeable. Job must live with this arbitrary God — there is no other option and no other God. Is not this the nub of Job's pain — that he is forced to recognize that in this form of his enemy he has to do with his God and no other, and that there is nowhere to which he can escape from this God? And indirectly is this not 5. One might even argue that creation ex nihilo is itself a disruption — a disruption, moreover, which renews itself in every new moment of creation. 6. This perspective is complemented, and perhaps even brought in question, by my analysis of the hymn to wisdom (Job 28) in the next chapter. There the emphasis, rather than one of disruption, will be on greater, sustainable cosmic structures that transcend even the disruptive processes of Job's self.

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also the truth of Job's vision in chapter 19, in which it is this alien God that Job hails as his redeemer, and not another God somehow behind and beyond this alien God, such that the latter can be dispensed with? Only by wrestling with God in his arbitrariness does he come to know in this same God one who is 'always more', whose arbitrariness is, rather, everlasting and infinite excess. This comes into even sharper focus in view of Job's role as (mokiacK). To recall, Job, as called God to account for his lack of accountability. But because of its paradoxical nature this trial seemed ultimately futile. Within the course of the dialogue, however, Job came to identify his with God. This had the effect of placing the trial within God, but it did not ensure God's hearing of Job's trial. The decisive step was only taken, therefore, when God, at the beginning of second speech out of the whirlwind, acknowledged and established Job as In this way, Job himself was drawn into the divine trial. After his long and harrowing trial against God, therefore, Job discovers that in this trial he has all along been participating in God's own trial. Having sought high and low for an answer to the place of God's hiding, he receives the answer that he is in this place already by virtue of the trial he has mounted. But this is an answer which does not allow him to leave his trial behind. It reveals to him, rather, that God is to be found within his trial; that his trial is his access to God. In establishing him as it sends him right back into it. In other words, he has not found an accountability of God outside or apart from this trial, but one which can only be known in it. Job's only access to God, therefore, is the argument that God is inaccessible. Job can only come to know God as non-arbitrary — as the one who elects him — in the process of his wrestling with this arbitrariness. This is not because God refrains from being the one who elects him outside this process, but that outside it, Job would exist outside — and against — the truth of his election by God. Not to wrestle with God, therefore, would be on Job's part a denial of the truth of his existence. There is no escape, then, from the processes of disruption and transformation to a more ultimate, stable reality. In this way, my account of obedience may be distinguished from two others. Up to now I have been preoccupied by an attempt to counter the first of these. To sum up, while my account is rooted in the fundamentality of election over creation, the counterposition understands salvation (as the outworking of election) to be that which builds unproblematically on a stable core of creation which is not subject to fundamental disruption and transformation, but which, rather, is gradually purified and renewed, gaining a transformed being. While my account rejects this kind of continuity, however, it does not leave us with sheer discontinuity. It is this which distinguishes it from the second alternative account, to which I now turn. In this, as in my account, disruption goes all the way down. But in contrast to mine, it understands the only connection between the old and the new to be one of witness. So far, this is

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the Barthian scenario. But it may be developed in a more rigid and consistent way than by Barth in an understanding of obedience as act: acts in which my old being conforms to and becomes identical with my new eschatological being. Undergirding this account is an understanding of God as lawgiver. The acts of obedience are defined in relation to particular commands of God given to particular people in particular times and places. Although not systematizable in any system of law like the friends' doctrine of retribution, these commands do function in a similar way to the friends' doctrine in their absolute prescriptiveness, which as we have seen results in a heteronomous relation between God and humanity. The problem that arises for this account is the problem of continuity within history. If God is free from any universal law, how do his commands hang together? The answer usually sought lies in the consistency and faithfulness of God to his own character. The life shaped by God's command therefore reflects this character, gaining a certain perceptible form. In contrast to this account, in which disruption and discontinuity characterize the relation between old and new creation, or historical and eschatological reality, my account involves disruption, not so much as something which occurs at the border between these realities, but rather as a process within history. This process of disruption constitutes, rather than an arbitrary transition between old and new creation (creating the need for an appeal to 'act' as a way of bridging the discontinuity), an emergent reality which is at once historical and eschatological. This dispenses with the problem of continuity within history, for the process of disruption and transformation itself has a distinctive trajectory and teleology (as we have seen in the dynamic of Job's transformation). Moreover, the law, understood now as a human institution, has a completely different function: rather than being unproblematically prescriptive it is to be wrestled with. This does not mean, as I have akeady stressed, that the doing of the law loses all its significance. But it is relativized by the deeper integrity reached through wrestling with it. And the result of this is that God's identity as lawgiver is also relativized. The one who blesses and curses the righteous and the wicked is more fundamentally the one who is to be feared for naught. 5 God

What can be inferred from all this about the God who is to be feared for naught? As we have discovered, the most fundamental way in which God relates to creation is in its disruption and transformation. This is the shape of his election of creation for naught. Job, moreover, is disrupted and transformed in the inward-probing dialectic in which he wrestles with God and God with him. Only within this process, therefore, does he live within 7. See pp. 99-100.

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the truth of his election. In terms of his role as , he only knows God as non-arbitrary, as the God of his election, in his argument that God is arbitrary. Outside this, he could only deny his election by God. The implication of this for God is that his election of Job intimately involves Job's own process of probing his integrity. In other words, God's election of Job is not so much something which is carried out upon a passive Job, but rather something which works itself out in him. Conversely, one might say that Job's searching out of himself is, more fundamentally, God's searching out of him; or that the former is rooted in the latter. Job's action occurs within the allencompassing action of God. This is the import of the fact that Job's trial participates in God's trial; that Job's action as is rooted in God's action as for Job. In his search for God, then, Job discovers God to be at the root of this search — that his search has all along been God's search. This leads to a definition of God as one who searches Job out — which, in turn, sheds further light on the Whirlwind speeches as the act of God. As the place where God (re-)asserts his radical precedence over Job, eclipsing Job's self in its claim on the arbitrary God at the root of the law, they are more evidently the point at which God subjects Job to fundamental interrogation, bringing Job's self into question. And this — if brought to its most intense expression in the Whirlwind speeches — is the implicit manner of God's presence throughout Job's harrowing search, as that which undergirds it. This alerts us to another important pair of words in the book of Job (and in the Bible more widely): (bachan\ 'to test, try, prove', and (chaqar), 'to search out, investigate, examine' — which merit, in the light of this inference about the nature of Job's God, a short excursus. Both terms capture the nature of God's interrogation, indeed functioning in several instances as quasi definitions of the God who tries and searches out: 'I the Lord, who searches i x ( the mind and tries ( i the heart ...' (Jer. 17.10; cf. Jer. 11.20; 20.^12; Ps. 7.10; all with ). ' moreover, was the Hebrew root that underlay Barth's discussion of self-examination, which takes place in the light of the divine examination of the human being. ° We will discover in due course, however, that in the God that is coming to view here — as one who searches out — a significant departure has been made from the God of Barth, who tests, decides and judges. first of all, has two closely related but nevertheless distinguishable nuances, similar to the word 'to try, prove' in English. On the one hand, it connotes a testing in order to find out the nature of that which is tested, of which some of the most unambiguous examples are Gen. 42.15—16; Job 12.11; 34.36 and Mai. 3.10. In Job 34.36 Elihu gives expression to his desire 8. This recalls Barth's understanding of the relation between self-examination and the divine examination of ourselves. Being carried out here is an implicit reworking of Barth's doctrine of election — which will become explicit below. 9. Whose most characteristic usage is in Wisdom literature, cf. VANGEMEREN, vol. 2, pp. 253-54.

10. CD 11.2, pp. 636-41.

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'that Job were tried ( ) to the end, because he answers like wicked men,' In this context, the term gains the legal connotations of Job's being put on trial by God. Although the specific term is not used there, this nuance of is most palpable in the prologue of Job, in which God agrees, in his wager with the Satan, to test the genuineness of Job's piety. On the other hand, it entails a 'trying' with its own intrinsic telos of purifying or refining the object being tried. Examples in which this nuance dominates often involve an analogy with the processes of refining gold or silver: 'The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, but the Lord tries hearts' (Prov. 17.3, cf. e.g. Ps. 66.10 and Zech. 13.9).n Most uses of the term, however, involve both nuances inseparably (e.g. Isa. 28.16; Pss. 11.4; 17.3; Jer. 9.6[7]; 17.10). It is in this way that Job describes God's overbearing and painful presence to him in 7.18: 'What is man ... that you visit him every morning, and test him ) every moment?' And later on in 23.10, after further development in Job's thought, the double nuance is even more evident: 'But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me ( ), I shall come forth as gold.' This has its charged background, furthermore, in Job's trial with God. In God's testing of human beings, then, we must hear both connotations: 'Prove me ( ), O Lord, and try me; test ( ) my heart and my mind' (Ps. 26.2). We found Job's process of probing his integrity to be inseparably a matter of discovery and making. This, we may now add, is also so on God's side: the process in which he searches Job out is a process in which he both discovers and makes Job's elected self. Such an emphasis on this double nuance, although not entirely foreign to it, is a significant departure from Barth's understanding of the divine examination. As the sovereign decision over human beings made by God from all eternity, the latter is the eschatological determination of humanity. As such, all emphasis is shifted on to the side of 'making'. There is no room for the continued discovery of human integrity within a history in which it is ever more deeply probed. The historical process in which God elects, establishes and searches out the human self, in other words, is collapsed into the eternal moment of decision by which the elected, eschatological self is constituted once and for all. There is a subtle but deep chasm here between Barth's 'transcendent' notion of the election, as the election of the eschatological, and the notion being developed here of election as occurring within the sanctification of the mixed self, and therefore inextricably within the processes of history. The word shares the double nuance of and is sometimes used in parallel with it, e.g. Ps. 139.23: 'Search me ( i, O God, and know my heart! Try me ( i and know my thoughts!' However, it introduces another direction of meaning which involves us in a further noteworthy 11. Cf. the root which is often used in such contexts in parallel with and has a similar double nuance, meaning on the one hand, 'to smelt, refine', and on the other hand, 'to test (and prove true)'. E.g. Prov. 17.3; Pss. 17.3; 26.2; 66.10.

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ambiguity. This is captured in the notion of the //^searchable, a usage frequent in Job (e.g. Job 5.9; 9.10; 36.26). " With exploration, in other words, comes a sense of the depths to be explored and thus the unfathomable regions beyond what is accessible. The ambiguity entailed in this, most obviously in the noun, is that between the activity of searching and the thing to be searched out. Examples of the former are Job 8.8, 34.24, and the other negative occurrences already listed (as well as all the instances of the verb, e.g. 5.27, 13.9). The latter is found in Job 11.7 of the 'deep things of God ( )', and in Job 38.16 of the 'recesses of the deep ( '. When used of God's searching out of persons, then, a sense of the boundless, even aporetic, depths of the self is present — their //^searchable nature being strongly connoted. Furthermore, the double nuance of activity and object beautifully captures what I hoped to demonstrate above: the inextricability of the self from the process of its probing. This is given expression in the following psalm in which God constitutes and forms the person by searching her out (Ps. 139.1—14): 0 Lord, you have searched me and known me! You know when 1 sit down and when 1 rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, () Lord, you know it altogether. You beset me behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, 1 cannot attain it. For you formed my inward parts. You knit me together in my mother's womb. 1 praise you, for you are fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are your works! Lastly, is used in contexts in which it gains manifest legal connotations. For example, Job 29.16: 'I was a father to the poor, and I searched out } the cause ' of him whom I did not know' (cf. Prov. 18.17). Here Job describes himself in the role of the for the underprivileged and oppressed. And in 13.9—10 Job warns the friends against unfair legal play, in case God choose to 'cross-examine ( i'14 them: 'Will it be well with you when he searches you out ( )? Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a human being?' (13.9). This also suggests that God's searching out 12. And characteristic of Wisdom literature in genera] (VANGKMKRKN, vol. 2, p. 254). 13. Cf. VANGiiMERKN, vol. 2, p. 252, who defines the noun as 'searching, what is searched out'. 14. HABKL'S translation.

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— or election — of the friends, because they live in denial of it, can only be to their damnation. More importantly, however, this confluence of the language of examination and searching out with the legal confirms my interpretation throughout the above of the role of the and the activity of probing in the light of one another — both in the case of Job's activity, and in that of God's in which it is rooted. 15 In the light of this excursus, which concretely fills out the definition of God we reached as one who searches out, it becomes possible to reinterpret God's election of Job (and of creation) for naught in terms of God's activity of searching out. God's 'for naught', in other words, is not a deus ex machina^ but a historically extended process. But if this is taken seriously as a process involving both making and discovery, then it has further implications for God. God does not stand to history as an eternal, transcendent decision to its playing-out in time, but is involved in history in a much more intimate and complex way. His activity as for Job involves, not only his engagement in trial with Job, but his engagement in trial against himself. Job's trial presupposes and participates in a more fundamental trial within God himself. God's continual disruption of history, in other words, presupposes this more fundamental disruption within God — in which God is against God. Perhaps it is this primordial disruption that is given representation in the dispute between God and the Satan in the prologue. Already here God plays the role of the on behalf of Job, keeping the Satan within the bounds of fairness (1.12, 2.6) and pleading for Job's integrity to be acknowledged (2.3). But what is the nature of this primordial disruption within God? Job's challenging of God's arbitrary authority, his wrestling with God, was discovered to be his probing of God's 'for naught' — his searching out of God, as we might now put it. But in this case, God's wrestling with himself is nothing other than his searching out of himself. To sum up, therefore, God's involvement in history in his searching out of Job involves even more fundamentally his searching out of himself. With this insight we have reached a very different understanding of God from that of Barth. For Barth, the divine decision as divine examination was never understood to correspond to a divine ^^-examination, as I conceive of it here. There is simply no place for this in God's eternal decision, which is made in relation to history but not within it. The reinterpretation I have carried out here of election as the activity of searching out ultimately has no place in Barth's theology. For Barth, rather, election retains its primary connotation of 'choice', with an emphasis on the divine will. For this reason, Barth is able to understand God's election of humanity as, more fundamentally, his election of himself — his own self-determination. God's choice of humanity is a choice to be the God of humanity, and this act of the will is at the beginning of God's ways. 15. I have not yet examined the two occurrences of in the hymn to wisdom (Job 28). 1 will come to these in the epilogue where I treat this hymn in its own right.

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But when election has been reinterpreted as the activity of searching out, this is a move that can no longer be made. God's activity of searching creation out is indeed rooted in his searching out of himself. But the parallel reasoning can go no further. If, as in Barth, God's turning to creation is primarily an act of will, then an act of will is presupposed in God in relation to himself behind which one cannot go. The most fundamental statement that can be made about God is that he has the freedom to will this way. ' But the statement that God searches himself out does not function as a buffer in this way. It is still a statement about the activity of God involved in God's relating to creation. God wrestles with God on behalf of Job. But what does this tell us about the nature of God in Godself? Because will is no longer understood to be fundamental, it cannot be said that God simply determines to be God as the God of creation, but rather that God is what he becomes for creation already in himself. In other words, God has a fundamentally dynamic nature which can be infinitely explored: it is ever greater, irreducible excess. It is for this reason that the most fundamental way in which he relates to creation is one of disruption and transformation. Any more static relation would be a denial of God's everlasting and ever-surprising excess. There is no relation to God, therefore, which ceases to grow and develop. There is simply always more of God. In sum, Barth's God was at root a God ultimately characterized by freedom — a freedom to choose how to be God. In correspondence with this, the principle ethical stance of the human being, summed up in the notion of self-examination, was a continual openness to being disrupted. In my understanding, by contrast, God is ever greater excess. This may also entail a disruptive understanding of the ethical life, but it is one in which the human being is not simply uprooted, but given direction, being taken deeper and deeper into God. And this journey deeper and deeper into God involves intense engagement with the excess of creation, which can only culminate in celebration of it. 6 Towards a Theodicy So far I have resisted any interpretation of the book of Job in terms of a theodicy, seeking instead to follow and investigate the journey of transformation undergone by Job in his relation to God. However, it does become possible in the course of this investigation to address the question of evil, its place in our world and God's relationship to it. Indeed, it is this question that 16. It is in this sense, as McCormack suggests, that the divine election is, for Barth, the ground even of God's triunity. See Chapter 1, n. 13. On my account, by contrast, will is no longer fundamental. As a result, God's prevenience is not just a matter of his freedom to turn towards creation. Rather, his turning towards creation is congruent with who God is in Godself. This is analogous to saying that God's triunity is the precondition for his entering into relation with creation (even if we have not reached a concept of God's triunity here).

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Job, in his wrestling with the arbitrary God at the base of the law, most fundamentally addresses. To be sure, Job does not seek an answer from God as to the reason for his suffering; he seeks, rather, to call God to account, to engage God in trial. Job, in other words, already knows the answer to his problem: God. His engagement with God in trial, therefore, is an attempt not so much to gain an explanation for his situation but to transform it. The Whirlwind speeches, then, are the culmination of this transformation, and not the answer to a problem. Nevertheless, the relation into which Job enters with God and the transformation he undergoes do tell us something about the nature of God's relation to an evil-ridden creation. It is this that I now seek to elucidate. As I concluded from Job's journey of transformation, the most fundamental way in which God relates to creation is in its disruption and transformation. And as I went on to infer, this disruption takes place first and foremost in God himself. What I did not comment upon was the way in which this implicates God in the evil and suffering of creation. The disruption undergone by Job is, as we have seen, painful and terrifying. At the root of Job's pain is the arbitrariness at the base of the socio-symbolic system, by which Job is made wretched. And because this arbitrariness is an arbitrariness only in respect of the socio-symbolic system, Job's pain is inextricably bound up with his implicatedness in this system. And this implicatedness is not only a matter of the friends' reinscription of him within it, which he could conceivably eschew, but of his own reduction of the creaturely world he inhabits to a set of identities within the law — to indices of his own pain. This pain, in other words, is the arbitrariness of God experienced by Job as a sinful human being. The disruption and transformation he undergoes, in all its pain and agony, is the disruption and transformation of his sinful being, and his pain the pain of his rejection. But the fact that God's disruption of Job involves, more fundamentally, disruption in God implies that God has taken this rejection into himself. God as FT DID on behalf of Job must argue against God. God thereby makes the wounds of creation his own wounds. Allowing himself to be disrupted by the evil of creation, God takes up its suffering into himself. But in doing so — by bringing creation to participation in him, by placing Job's trial within the divine trial — he transforms the disruption in which creation is rejected into the disruption of its election. In arguing against himself, he argues for Job. Job's trial against an arbitrary God becomes his access to the God who has elected him for naught. The disruption in which he was made wretched is discovered to be the process in which God searches out his deeper integrity. This involvement of God as one who searches out is what transforms the pain of evil into the disruption of election. In this way, God takes up the evil of creation into himself in order to transform it. This account of God's relation to the suffering and evil of creation resists, on the one hand, the notion of an omnipotent and impassible deity whose intervention could apparently solve the evils of the world. God's relation to

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creation cannot be one of a deus ex machina. Rather, in his intimate involvement with it, God is already at work in creation, healing its wounds from within. On the other hand, this intimate involvement is not such that God is subsumed in the currents of history. Rather, as we have seen, creation is taken up in God and transformed. In other words, God's immanence in creation is not such that it precludes his transcendence of it. The nature of his transcendence, rather, is such as to transcend the distinction between involvement and aloofness, between passiblity and impassibility. More importantly, God exceeds even the distance that creation in its rebellion has put between itself and God. God can contain even this disruption — and by doing so transforms it into its healing. That God is not simply an omnipotent and impassible deity implies, moreover, that humanity is not simply that which is acted upon, all responsibility being removed from it. Rather, God's involvement in creation and history invests humanity with a responsibility for the transformation of the world. As we have seen, God's searching out of Job, by which he is transformed, intimately involves his searching out of himself. Indeed, not apart from Job's activity as is God's justice towards Job carried out. And not only towards Job: as we discovered, Job's institution as was what ultimately effected the shift from prologue to epilogue, where by contrast to the sacrifices he made for his children, his sacrifice for his friends is effective. It is his activity as , in other words, that brings about a transformation in his society. God's work of transformation, therefore, does not take place in isolation from our own, but works itself out in it. This is the extent of our responsibility, who as of God ensure that God's justice is done in the world. The theodicy being advanced here — in which God's transformation of the evil of creation is the 'answer' to the problem of evil — cannot, therefore, be given in the abstract. For a life lived outside this transformation can only deny and falsify this answer. As we have seen, it is only in wrestling with God that Job gains access to a non-arbitrary God. He does not find an accountability of God outside this wrestling. Indeed, if he had claimed God to be accountable without mounting his argument against God, he would have captured this accountability in a meaningless concept of it which would no longer have been Gods accountability. Job wrestles with God as God wrestles with the world, and only as such can he hold to the non-arbitrary, gracious God by whom he is transformed. Therefore, if our 'answer' is not to be rendered meaningless, we must not offer it in replacement of the journey into which the book of Job has ushered us, but must allow it to send us further on it and deeper into the book. In other words, it is not the answers we might glean from the book that are of greatest importance, but the journey of transformation on which it leads us, disrupting even the way we construe the questions.

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8 Epilogue: Self, Society and World And re-embark on this journey of transformation is precisely what I will do in this epilogue. Rather than end on the conceptual note of the previous chapter, it seems more appropriate — in line with the hermeneutic to which the book of Job has invited us — to re-enter the text in such a way that the conceptuality expounded and developed there is relativized by its resubmission to the rigours and complexities of the text, which it only began to fathom. An analysis of the hymn to wisdom (Job 28) is suitable for this purpose for several reasons — not least because my interpretation so far has not yet touched upon it. It stands out from the rest of the poem (although flowing straight on from a speech of Job) first of all by virtue of its tone. In contrast to the explosive, confrontational and angry character of the contest between Job and God, its tone is serene and irenic. There is a shift, further, from the introspective dynamic of Job's speeches to the hymn's description of human activity in the world at large. The hymn is no longer a view from the inside — of the inner mechanisms of Job's integrity or internal logic of his 'for naught' relation to God. It has emerged from this, it would seem, in order to gain a view of its broader, less anguished context. For these kinds of reasons, the hymn is often thought to be a secondary addition to the book of Job." But these significant discontinuities — which will serve to open up and transcend any interpretative closure so far reached — are not without accompanying and equally significant continuities. Walter Moberly has argued, for instance, that the hymn's serenity of tone, while standing out against the rest of the poem, has affinities with the calm and assured tone of the prose narrative. Moreover, Job is described at the beginning of the prologue in exactly the same terms that are used to define wisdom at the end of the hymn: 'Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;

1. According to GOOD, there is an unbridgeable leap between the hymn's description of the technologies of mining and the issue of justice that concerns the rest of the poem (p. 290). 2. This is the almost unanimous view of fob scholars. Moberly is an exception (sec 'Solomon and Job', pp. 12-15). 3. 'Solomon and Job', p. 12.

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and to depart from evil is understanding7 (28.28). Such observations, and others beside, lead him to suggest that c[t]he voice to which the poem is most appropriately ascribed is the voice of the narrator who tells the initial scenesetting story' (p. 12)/ He goes on to insist that the hymn is best interpreted 'in closest proximity to the specific concerns of the book of Job' (p. 15). In its analysis of the logic of the hymn, the interpretation I offer below is largely indebted to Moberly's careful and perceptive interpretation. However, it will seek to relate the hymn, not just to the prose narrative, but also, and perhaps primarily, to its immediate context in the poem. In this respect, I will treat the hymn as a third voice between the introspection of the poem and the social world of the prose narrative. The hymn's continuity with the rest of the book has the consequence that its opening up of the interpretative closure hitherto reached is not of a disruptive nature. Rather, it places the personal, judicial and social concerns of the book in a greater context in which they are transcended but not undermined. Its peaceful tone is matched, therefore, by its peaceful hermeneutic, which is mediatorial rather than disruptive. In this way, even the category of disruption is relativized and transcended. This hermeneutic reflects the nature of the wisdom the hymn seeks to portray, whose elusiveness is not such as to negate the structures of creation, but to place them, rather, in relation to the God who transcends them and to whom they are ultimately accountable. The hymn to wisdom (Job 28) is framed by two occurrences of the word (chaqar, search out): " He sets an end to darkness, and searches out ) to the farthest bound the ore in gloom and deep darkness. " Then he [God] saw it [wisdom] and declared it; he established it, and searched it out ( ).

In my analysis of the poem I came to understand Job's activity as, most fundamentally, his searching out of himself (and his being sought out by God); his probing of his integrity. And in the light of this I reached a definition of God as 'one who searches out', expounding this further by way of an examination of the usage of the verb both within Job and in the Bible as a whole. And it is this verb which appears again in the hymn to wisdom. In the rest of the poem, in its association with the activity of the , the activity of searching out accrued legal connotations. Job's inward search — which was also his search for God — was carried out by way of his 4. Moberly comments, 'If wisdom is a matter of fearing God and turning away from evil, and the story of Job shows what it means for such qualities to be genuine, then Job's demonstration of his integrity is a paradigmatic display of wisdom' (p. 12). Cf. HABEL, p. 393. 5. Cf. HABEL, pp. 392-93.

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wrestling with God in legal confrontation. And God's searching out of Job involved a trial within God, in which God acted as for Job and against God. In the hymn, however, different associations of the word are drawn upon and brought out. We recall the boundless, ///^searchable depths of the self which God searched out. But perhaps even more elusive, even more unsearchable, is wisdom. And it is this elusiveness that the hymn seeks to portray. And it does so by setting up a comparison between wisdom in its elusiveness (28.12—27) and the wonders of human activity and attainment within the world (28.1—11) — both of which involve searching out (w. 3, 27).' The logic of this comparison, however, is far from self-evident. The connecting particle (v. 12) is little help in this respect, being the thoroughly ambiguous waw^ which could contain the import of 'or, then, but, notwithstanding, thus' etc. as well as simply £and'. And to complicate matters further, the hymn concludes with a summative statement concerning wisdom which appears to introduce yet another perspective on it, in which it is related to human piety (v. 28). Owing to its apparent contradiction of the elusiveness of wisdom, this is often thought to be a later redactional addition. In any case, only once we have grasped the logic of the comparison will we be able to ascertain the force and purpose of the description in w. 1— 11 and the relation of this searching out to that which is carried out by and within Job in the rest of the poem. Most commentators assume the comparison to be an essentially negative one, displaying the ultimate inadequacy of human attainment, however grand and awe-inspiring this may be, on the basis of its inability to acquire the one thing necessary — wisdom.8 If v. 28 is then taken into account, the hymn can be understood to be promoting religion as opposed to human ingenuity or skill as the way to attain wisdom. Scholars then differ over whether the same elusive wisdom is meant here, received only on the basis of God's revelation,

6. Cf. HABl-l., p. 396: 'The act of "penetrating/probing" points to the mystery of Wisdom which finally only God can "probe" , v. 27). Thus, the mining exercise is a paradigm for probing a mystery in the natural domain which parallels probing wisdom at a deeper level in the cosmic domain.' 7. Kg. DRIVER GRAY, POPK, von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (trans. J.D. Martin; London: SCM, 1972), pp. 148-49, contra GORDIS, ROWLKY. 8. P^.g. DRIYKR-GRAY, HABi