« Convocation on Job Session V
Main
That's What Obstruction is All About »
April 18, 2007
The Convocation on Job: My Reflections
There is a link list to this series in my report on the first session.
Let me begin my reflections on the Convocation on Job with a couple of observations about the Book of Job itself. Job is among the most difficult books to read in Hebrew. An unusually large part of the vocabulary is obscure and the grammar is often more so. In addition, translators, ancient and modern, have dealt with these complexities in various, sometimes contradictory, ways. At the conference, my fellow student, Stan Rummel recalled on taking an advanced Hebrew grammar course with William Whedbee and thinking the course was fairly challenging until it got to the Book of Job when it suddenly became nearly impossible. I'm not sure that I took that course the same semester as Stan, but I did take the course and had exactly the same reaction. In addition, the Book of Job uses Eloah as a divine appellative far more frequently than any other book in the Hebrew Bible. It also uses a collection of other divine names, El, Shaddai, that, while not unique, are unusual at the frequency found in Job. And while one god is central to the various themes of Job, there is clearly a polytheistic mythological substrate that often leaves one wondering whether to take certain words as common nouns or divine names, Mot, Yamm, etc. Loren Fisher, in my opinion correctly, translates most, if not all, of these words as if they were divine names.
With that background, I will proceed. First, I think Loren is correct that the Book of Job is best read as two books plus some later additions. Job 2:11-26:14 appears to me to be a self-contained unit. Job 2:11-13 may well have been part of this unit's original prose epilogue with only these few verses surviving. I agree that on formal and thematic grounds this section cannot extend beyond Job 26:14 and it does not include the theophany. It likely once had its own, now lost, epilogue. I further agree that this is the second oldest block in the Book of Job and that at one time it very likely stood alone as a treatise against orthodox views such as divine justice and an omnipotent god or gods. This is Loren's Job II, his Rebel Job. As such, this work was certainly a reaction to an earlier set of views and likely an earlier literary work.
Loren calls that earlier literary work Job I. Traditions associated with Job are indeed ancient and likely were ancient at the time Job II was written. Job is referred to as a person along with Dan'el (not to be confused with Daniel), now known from Ugarit, and Noah in Ezekiel 14:14-20. It is reasonable to posit that Jovian stories were known in the Late Bronze age just as the story of Dan'el was know in the Late Bronze Age. It is even reasonable to posit that they came to be written down in that period and entered the Hebrew linguistic environment at a very early date in written form. If I ever get around to it, I hope to outline in my next post on scribal schools, I think it is reasonable to believe that there was Hebrew literature in the Iron I and certainly in the Early Iron II periods. Job I could well have been part of that literature.
So how about Job II? When was it written? Loren argues, I think largely on Egyptian and Mesopotamia literary parallels, that it too is old, just not as old as Job I. He places it in the scribal school associated with the court of King David. I find any date for Job II hard to defend. However, Loren has done a good job of establishing the possibility of it being that old. The two other attempts at dating it suggested at the conference were in part, or in total, based on historical events that might call forth the deep skepticism that is central to Job II. Such views were sometimes supported by supposed illusions in the Book of Job to other more datable works. For example, Sanders', building on the work of Yohan Pyeon, suggested a seventh century BCE date for the origin of the Book of Job (exclusive of the Wisdom poem and the speeches of Elihu). If my memory is correct, Marvin Sweeney in discussion suggested a somewhat earlier date, the time of Hezekiah. I have not read Pyeon's work, so I should not say too much other than to note that literary illusions can go both ways. Many common themes and other linguistic elements are long lived. And they may exist side by side with other, sometimes contradictory, themes. Illusions to common cultural material do not, by themselves, justify dating one work chronologically before or after another. But then, I should read Pyeon before I say too much. As one who studies both Ugaritic literature and the Hebrew Bible, what I do know is that expressions found in Ugaritic sometimes do not appear in the Hebrew Bible until surprisingly late. That doesn't mean that they weren't in the cultural repertoire. It only means that given even the extensive Hebrew literature we possess from the Hebrew Bible we, nonetheless face a sampling problem. I don't think that it is necessary to posit any historical event like an attack on Jerusalem to anchor a date for a work like Job as a whole and certainly not for Job II. Such events may engender renewed interest in a literature that is already extant.
In addition to the polytheistic substrate that I mentioned, Job, and Job II in particular, has a distinctly international flavor. We are told that Job is from Uz and his three friends are a Temanite, a Shuhite and a Naamathite; all often thought to be from Edom or just south of Edom but certainly not from Israel or Judah. The Near Eastern mythological traditions upon which the book draws add to this international flavor. All of this leads me to believe that the Job II is most at home in a scribal center like the one to which Loren attributes it: the scribal school at Jerusalem. For reasons I plan to discuss elsewhere, Job II and Job I for that manner, could well have been used as scribal training exercises in taking dictation for the most advanced students. The language is not for novices nor is it for the general reader if there were such a thing.
On what basis might one argue that Job II was older than say Hezekiah? Here I think one can only be suggestive. But any dating must first of all be based on a possibility before one can suggest a probability. And as I said before, Loren has done us a great service in establishing the possibility. His extensive knowledge of Near Eastern literature does not allow us to take his intuition regarding a probable date of origin lightly. In fact, I think there is at least one set of supporting evidence in favor of a fairly early date for Job II: the polytheistic substrate. While this substrate does not exactly match what one sees in Hebrew epigraphy, it is in my view indicative of a fairly old origin. Zevit, 519-520, thinks Isaiah 28:15 and 18, reflect a Mot cult in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. Using theophoric elements in both personal and place names, Zevit documents many of the divine names for the "lesser" gods seen in Job as being part of the early Iron Age Israelite pantheon. Zevit, 648, lists,
Perhaps more difficult in the context of contemporary scholarly discussion is the idea that a Biblical book should be read as independent composite elements. In the case of Job, that means read as two books with additions. This difficulty was apparent in the presentations by Sanders, Wilcox and Pixley. While acknowledging the possible validly of Loren's reading to a greater or lesser extents, all three thought the only ultimately satisfying way to understand Job was to understand it in its final form. For this reason, all three of their presentations told the Job I's story to the neglect, even the dismissal of Job II's. There are several reasons that contemporary scholarship favors the final form of a book to a much greater extent than it did when I was a student. Among these are practical as well as theological and philosophical reasons. On the one hand, the enthusiasm for the application of critical methodologies to discern with certainty the various layers of the written tradition has waned in the face of large-scale failures to reach consensus among scholars on these issues. While everyone may agree that this or that book is composite, wide consensus on the relative age of the literary layers and even their composition has often remained elusive. On the other hand, an idealistic effort to find theological purity in the oldest strata of a tradition while viewing the more recent strata as more or less corrupt has given way to an effort to understand the importance of the final form of a work to the believing ("signifying") community. Part of this transition was driven by a growth in interest in canon that took place during the last third of the twentieth century. Sanders' work was an important part of this development. Another, related, driver has been certain shifts in literary criticism away from the trying to understand the intention of the author and toward how a given work was understood by its various audiences. Pixley's paper reflected this trend as he attempted to understand how Job might be read in the context of Latin American liberation theology. In summary, scholars like Sanders seek to understand how a work is understood by its ever changing "signifying communities" while scholars like Pixley tend to ignore much of the historical context in favor of a "relevant" contemporary reading for some believing community.
I have little patience, Jovian or otherwise, for Pixley's position however interesting I may find it in terms of the ways in which an ancient text might inform a modern believing community. In one way, I am baffled as to why one would want to do such a thing. It is only the fact that some do have such a motive and that others look, for whatever reason, to this or that set of ancient texts for some kind of guidance that makes this approach at all interesting. I'll get back to this issue when I discuss why Loren's work on Job is important.
If one accepts Loren's parsing of the Book of Job, we have an extremely interesting example that plays well with some aspects of audience criticism and does not claim a special place for the oldest stratum of the text. For Loren the special place goes to the second layer, Job II, the Rebel Job. Job II is a work by an author who is part of the audience for the earlier work which upheld orthodoxy. As a member of that audience he or she reacts against it. Those who adhere to orthodoxy now become the Rebel's audience and they react against him by integrating the Rebel's work into the older piece of literature. These two "signifying communities," one weaker and more adventurous and one stronger and more tradition bound, struggle with each other even as we read their respective works. If this interaction of ideas occurred at any time during the history of transmission of the Jovian material, then I think it hard to claim that it is somehow a false or, perhaps worse, irrelevant interpretation. In fact, at first glance, Sanders appears to come close to endorsing Loren's understanding of the Book of Job. But by insisting that Job II include chapters 29-31, he mutes the voice of the Rebel and in many ways make him nothing more than another adherent to orthodoxy. I find Loren's formal and thematic arguments for excluding these chapters from Job II very persuasive.
I do have a couple of questions. First, while Loren tells a compelling story of a fictional master scribe, Jonathan, writing Job II and having it almost eminently slapped down by the orthodox and then neutered by incorporation into the older story, I wonder if that is what would have actually happened. Within the context of that fictional story, one sees the reason that Job II was at least partially preserved. See Loren's The Minority Report, Silenced by Religion. But is that a high probability explanation of how the larger Book of Job came about? Rather, I think that unless there was a community that valued the work over some extended period of time, it would have simply been ignored or aggressively banned. In other words, it wouldn't have been allowed to see the light of day even dressed up as somehow orthodox. On the other hand, if it was indeed used over some period of time, perhaps only one whole generation of influential students would be enough, as part of the scribal training curriculum, then it might have developed a large enough constituency of powerful persons that it needed to be dealt with in some more subtle way. Second, I am not as sure as Loren what makes up the Job I. For example, I vacillate on including the theophany in Job I. Never do I think it part of Job II. Sometimes I think it is a post Job II addition like the wisdom poem and the Elihu material. On other occasions, I agree with Loren that it is at some level responsive to the Job I speech in Job 27, 29-30.
Why is any of this important? In one sense, it is no more important than how we understand any other ancient work that is part of our cultural heritage. In that sense, it is no more important than how we understand the Odyssey or Gilgamesh. But if that were all that there is to it, it would truly be an abnormal interest that only attracts the concerns of a small group of well-trained specialists. But seen in another way, because of religious claims that they have some special authority, ancient works like Job have a status in our heritage that defines them as somehow more important, more pertinent than other ancient writings. The Rebel Job is important because progress in human thought takes place by the accumulation of changes in outlook of individuals until some critical mass of opinion is reached. There are few global revolutionary changes in thought. Whenever these moments of individual enlightenment occur, we should celebrate them. The Rebel Job represents one of those liberating changes in outlook. That it is preserved among texts that some consider of special authority makes Job II itself of special importance. Even in a world where the statements of progressive views constitute minority reports, there is still a place for the Rebel.
References:
Zevit, Ziony, The Religions of Ancient Israel, A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches, London: Continuum, 2001
Posted by Duane Smith at April 18, 2007 8:06 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2079