Cosmic Bully Or God Of Grace? The Book Of Job As Māšāl

By David R. Jackson

[David R. Jackson is head of Biblical Studies at the William Carey Christian School in Prestons, New South Wales, Australia. This article is a revised version of a paper he presented at the Society of Biblical Literature International Congress in Vienna on July 8, 2014.]

Introduction

In his 2011 commentary on Job 38–42, David Clines masterfully demonstrates the ambiguities of the conclusion to Job’s suffering as expressed in Job 42:6. Clines concludes that the book of Job reveals Job as a hero who will not bow to God as “cosmic bully.”[1] Significantly, the one thing on which all the characters in the drama of Job agree is the aseity and autonomy of God. Job’s comment that God “has made me a māšāl to the peoples” (17:6) may reflect more than an offhand remark. In this article we explore the possibility that the ambiguity Clines has so effectively analyzed may be a deliberate rhetorical device in keeping with the extensive use of irony and sarcasm throughout the work, designed to provoke the reader/audience to choose their own conclusion.

I. The Question

A review of the literature quickly demonstrates that the number of Job’s “friends” has multiplied exponentially over the centuries. Given the beginning of the work, the reader would expect Job to persevere in his faith and, eventually, God would vindicate him and prove his accusers wrong. Such expectations would be fulfilled if the reader skipped from Job 1–2 to 42:7–17. What confuses this simple reading of the book is (1) the cut and thrust of the disputes in chs. 3–37, (2) the way the Lord addresses Job in chs. 38–41, and (3) Job’s final words in 42:1–6—did Job repent?

While the use of irony and sarcasm throughout the book has been widely recognized, the possibility that the book of Job, as a whole, functions as dramatic irony, or māšāl, has not been adequately investigated.

II. The Book Of Job As Māšāl

As a literary, and not merely a rhetorical, technique, irony engages the reader or audience in the social dynamics of consensus and dissent with respect to meaning, values, belief, and commitment. Colebrook notes,

Irony, even at its most obvious, is always diagnostic and political: to read the irony you do not just have to know the context; you also have to be committed to specific beliefs and positions within the context. 

At the very least, irony is elitist: to say one thing and mean another, or to say something contrary to what is understood, relies on the possibility that those who are not enlightened or privy to the context will be excluded.… Irony is essentially, avowedly and positively elitist: it works against common sense, the unrefined intellect and the social use of language.[2]

Irony interrogates social conventions. As a form of antilanguage, literary irony enables the author to speak to a mixed audience, confusing others while affirming those who share the author’s paradigm. As such, literary irony maps well with the biblical construct of māšāl, or parable. Polk concludes, with respect to the māšāl,

Telling a parable is a matter of presenting to others an imaginatively shaped paradigm (a model of reality, a description of experience) and asking that they recognize it as somehow true. From the point of view of the parable, the readers’ determination toward it, whatever their responses, identifies their place in the parable’s world, and hence their relation to its truth. In our judgments toward the parable, the parable judges us. So it is with the māšāl.[3]

Sharp counsels that

no hermeneutics of sacred texts can proceed effectively without taking account of the dynamics of resistance and misdirection enacted by irony. 

Irony has been considered morally suspect … for at least two reasons. First, irony is based on a kind of dissembling that some deem morally unacceptable.… Second, irony enacts a form of rhetorical power that seems to claim for the ironist a kind of objective distance, an evasion of full engagement in community life.[4] 

The challenge then is for the audience to identify the irony and perceive the reversal of meaning intended. “The ironies within a literary text are signalled either by plot or by disjunctions of character and context.”[5]

Fowler’s description of “dramatic irony” accords well with the literary character of the book of Job:

A third type, (c), is called dramatic irony in which the audience or reader knows more about the outcome of a play or an epic poem than the character or characters do because the author has, as it were, taken the audience or reader into his confidence at an early stage.[6]

The challenge of the book of Job is to establish the author’s governing context and framework within which the particular reversals of meaning may be definitively identified. It is at this level that any reading of any pericope within the book stands or falls. One must identify the speakers who express the author’s paradigm.

Dramatic irony relies on the natural self-centeredness of the reader to misdirect the “foolish” reader while asserting the wisdom of the author’s paradigm. Readers instinctively identify with the “hero” or “virtuous” character in any narrative. It was a mark of Jesus’ wisdom that it took his enemies so long to realize that they were being identified in Jesus’ parables with the wicked (Mark 12:12). The natural response to a narrative that contradicts one’s paradigm or self-understanding is not to say “I am wrong,” but “I don’t understand.” Confusion reveals the incapacity of “the fool” to understand the wisdom of an author’s alternative paradigm.

Readers of the book of Job naturally focus on the character of righteous Job and his suffering, reading the whole book under the terms of the question, How can the righteous suffer? In so doing they miss the dominant question, posed by the author. The clues are brief (but clear) while the distracters are extensive.

III. Context

In Job 1, God draws the satan into advancing a proposition that is then put to the test. His assertion subtly but effectively challenges the wisdom of God. If the satan’s assertion were to be sustained, God would appear as a fool. God initiates the debate with the assertion that Job is a blameless man. God clearly takes delight in Job, much as a father might take pride in his child. The satan counters that God has been deceived and manipulated. Job’s fear of God is a subterfuge. Like a foolish parent, God has spoiled his boy. The satan initiates the flow of sarcasm evident in subsequent disputations as he rudely challenges God to “stretch out your hand and strike all that he has and see if he will bless you to your face” (1:11; so also 2:5). Translators consistently reverse the sarcasm into a straight reading of “he will curse you to your face,” thereby obscuring the impact of Job’s response in 1:21, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Tucked away in the opponent’s vocabulary is a word that is of the highest significance for the author’s governing agenda. That word is h.innām (1:9), introducing the concept of actions that are gratuitous. The opposite construction, as proposed by the opponent, is actions that obey certain rules of reciprocity. The question then is, Could any human being fear God and relate to him with integrity in a relationship that is not motivated by reward, protection, or prosperity? Is there such a thing as a human being for whom God is more important than self? Is God a fool who cannot see through the dishonesty and manipulation of a sycophant?

With perhaps greater clarity than most commentators, Clines has focused much of his attention on the scandalous nature of the question of God’s aseity and autonomy which follows. God, as presented by the author, is subject to no law or system of fair play outside of himself. Clines well notes the offense that this concept carries for mankind, and in particular for Job’s human opponents, who wish to defend God’s actions according to their definition of fairness.

The author presents God as one who is not at all subject to such rules. Job’s gratuitous commitment to God as supreme not only in his behavior, but his motivation, is an example of what God requires and expects. Job is “blameless” (tām) in God’s sight. This then introduces another concept that will run powerfully throughout the book (1:1, 8; 2:3; 4:6; 8:20; 9:20, 21, 22; 21:23)—can any human be “blameless”? The opponent, and Job’s friends, verbalize the impossibility of such. Both God, and Job, insist on, and refuse to deny, Job’s “integrity/ blamelessness” (tummāh, 2:3, 9; 27:5; 31:6).

If Job’s integrity were to be false—if he were to deny his integrity—then the satan’s case would be proven. That would prove God a fool.

The issue is brought into sharp focus in Job 2:3 when God renews the challenge, reasserting Job’s integrity but, in even more scandalous terms, going on to affirm God’s right to permit the satan to inflict such suffering on the blameless man, “gratuitously” (h.innām, Job 2:3). The satan here is accountable to God. There is no hint that God is accountable to any. Were that to be so, he would cease to be God and be but a creature subject to a higher law.

The question then posed by the book of Job, through the assertions of the satan, is whether God is a fool, deceived and manipulated by a man such as Job into thinking that anyone would put him above their own selfish priorities. Could it be possible that there could be, as God affirms Job to be, a blameless human being—a person of integrity? The question as to how the righteous can suffer under the just rule of God becomes then the sub-text and the distracter.

IV. Sub-Text

The relationship between the context and sub-text may be well illustrated if we note the five affirmations that constitute the conundrum. For Job’s counselors, all five of these statements cannot be true:

1. God is righteous.
2. God is sovereign (nothing happens except by his decision).
3. Job is blameless.
4. God cares for people.
5. The calamities afflicting Job are real.

For all of the speakers in the book of Job the sovereignty and righteousness of God are beyond question as is the reality of Job’s suffering.

Job’s friends make the logical jump to conclude that Job’s assertion of his integrity constitutes a denial of the justice of God. That question is put to Job in those terms by God (40:8, “Will you condemn Me that you may be justified?”), echoing the words of Bildad (8:3) and Elihu (34:12; cf. Abraham’s words in Gen 18:25).

At the point where Job sounds most as if he is charging God with wrong (19:6, “Know then that God has wronged me”), his words occur in a conditional clause (19:5), the condition being that if Job’s friends were ultimately to be proven correct, then God would have wronged him. This is a possibility which Job vigorously refutes, looking rather to his Redeemer-kinsman and believing that his vindication must happen even if he dies (19:6–27).

The friends, and perhaps the readers, assume that God’s court has sat and Job’s accuser has brought about a conviction resulting in Job’s present suffering. Job, however, is convinced that no such court case has occurred. He allows only that his opponents are responding to Job’s present suffering with false rationalizations.

Job has not denied the righteousness of God at all. Rather, contra the satan (1:9–12; 2:4–5), and the friends (Eliphaz, 15:14; 22:1; Bildad, 25:4), he has affirmed that a man can be righteous before God and that he is such a man (6:29). Job refers back to “the words of the Holy One/of his mouth” (6:10; cf. 23:12)—an assertion that tantalizingly begs many further questions. For Job to deny these words from God correlates precisely with any denial of Job’s integrity. The reader has had information pertaining to God’s heavenly court that none of the earthly speakers has known, but somehow Job alludes to words of God known to himself of which no one else, including the reader, is aware, thus intensifying the dramatic force of the overarching context. Even when the audience is taken into the secrets of the heavenly court, when readers think they know all, there is still more that they do not know.

Job’s complaint is not that God has denied Job’s righteousness or acted unjustly toward him. Rather, his complaint and constant cry is that he has been unable to face his opponent (whoever that may be) in God’s courtroom (10:2). Were that possible, he fully expects God to confirm his status as a blameless man and so vindicate him. He cannot imagine how a man could enter God’s court and bring the matter to judgment (9:1–14, 20, 32), although he can imagine that he could stand in God’s court and call for mercy (9:15).

This is a far cry from Clines’s suggestion that Job looks forward to “a face-to-face confrontation with the heavenly bully who maltreats him.”[7] Neither is Clines justified in asserting that Job “binds himself and his destiny to his own construction of himself; if his self-understanding falls, he falls—he curses God and he dies.”[8] Quite the contrary, Job puts his confidence in these mysterious words of God and contra the satan’s assertion against God, and his wife’s urging (2:9), he will not and does not curse God.

Job is in touch with the gratuitous nature of his suffering, unlike the friends (4:7). Sarcastically he notes that even a fish knows that their model of retribution is not how the world is governed (12:7–9). While this all invites the logical conclusion that Job is charging God with injustice, the fact that God has explicitly affirmed the gratuitous nature of his suffering (2:3) removes the possibility that Job needs to repent of such language. God is not admitting guilt in 2:3, and Job does not charge God with injustice. Job and God are of one mind on the subject of Job’s righteousness and of God’s right to do with Job as he wills. Job simply wants God to affirm these truths against the charges of his friends. The satan has left God’s court, never to be heard from again, having had his charge against God proven false by Job’s faithfulness. In Job’s earthly court, where men apply the rules of human justice, Job has yet to be vindicated because the Judge cannot be summoned into a human courtroom nor can a man enter God’s heavenly court.

This confusion colors the translation of the noun mišpāt. throughout the book. The noun occurs twenty-three times in the book of Job. In the context of the disputes, there is a critical difference between saying that God has denied Job “justice” (meaning that God is unjust) and saying that God has not entered into “judgment” to publicly adjudicate Job’s case. The LXX consistently translates the word with terms drawn from the word-group krino, krima, krisin. English translators oscillate between “justice” and words indicating an unresolved matter of judgment such as “my case,” “charges,” “judgment,” “go to court,” “dispute,” “the/my cause.” The effect is to misrepresent Job, in places, as asserting that he has been denied justice or his rights, and so constitute an accusation of injustice against God. Rather, all Job asserts is that God has not allowed Job to defend himself in God’s courtroom against the charges of his opponents.

Job alone affirms all five statements, but cannot understand how it all works. Job’s counselors are certain that the only logical resolution to this reality is to deny Job’s blamelessness.

For contemporary readers a very different paradigm is assumed. The first statement to go is God’s righteousness, not the man’s. Thus Clines can conclude,

Job can hear nothing that is not addressed to his single issue of concern: the question of justice. From Yahweh’s point of view, Job is being recalcitrant, but from Job’s point of view, though he will have to submit and withdraw his case (v. 6) he is not going to accept that he has received the shadow of an answer. 

Was the Yahweh of the speeches not the very same deity that Job had imagined in his worst nightmares as a cosmic bully who cannot be held to account (9:12–20)? 

It is not the beatific vision that Job desires, not communion with the divine, not some placid sinking into the everlasting arms, but a face-to-face confrontation with the heavenly bully who maltreats him.[9]

So also Curtis who presents his extraordinary translation of 42:6: “therefore I feel loathing contempt and revulsion [toward you, O God] and I am sorry for frail man.”[10] Curtis depicts the Lord as the most distant, cruel, and uncaring egotist before whom the pathetic hero, Job, stands defiant.

Perhaps contemporary commentators such as Clines and Curtis actually have a better grasp of the author’s intended paradigm than Job’s counselors might ever have imagined, although their response to the matter may be other than the author’s intent.

V. Job’s Vindication Is Contingent Upon God’s

The denial of God’s wisdom governs any attempt to understand the apparent disjunctions between the speeches. Attempts to relocate passages so that perceived difficulties are harmonized reconstruct the book to suit the reader’s paradigm and miss the irony marked by these contextual disjunctions.

Elihu, in the context of the document as it stands, is a satirical figure. He is the counterpoint to Job’s complaint that whereas once he was honored as an elder, now he is treated with contempt by his juniors (30:1). Whereas the older men have accused one another of being windbags (8:2; 11:2; 15:2, 35; 16:2–3), Elihu boasts that he is full of words, like a bloated belly about to belch forth (32:17–20). The audience may be excused for responding to the ambiguity as to the direction that wind might take. This youth claims perfection in knowledge (36:4) superior to his elders. He begins his speeches with a long introduction (32:6–33:7) telling the audience how wonderful his speech will be. While for the most part his words may be true, they are irrelevant to the question at hand. Finally, in a crescendo of exquisite irony and comedy, Elihu closes with a poetic description of the visible appearance of God (37:1–22) concluding with the words, “The Almighty—we cannot find him.” Immediately the theophany appears and God speaks (38:1). Elihu’s last words are, “He does not regard any who are wise of heart”—and Elihu disappears.

Readers are surprised again by the unexpected tone of Yahweh’s address and questioning of Job. As Clines so aptly puts it, God does here “comport himself like one of the interlocutors in the book.”[11] Here again is an example of the misdirection of the dramatic ironist. Were this theater (and this book begs to be performed as theater), one might imagine God gazing towards the three friends on one side with feigned astonishment, pointing at Job on the other as he asks, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (38:2). The questions directed toward Job in the divine speeches, as I have argued elsewhere, repeat the accusations of Job’s friends.[12] God here is, indeed, “comporting himself” like an actor in a play, taking over the role of Job’s opponents and putting their questions again to Job.

Commentators regularly note the seeming irrelevance of the Divine Speeches (chs. 38–41) in addressing the sub-text as the perceived central question of the book. God is understood to speak at some length about himself and his power, ignoring all of Job’s questions. Yet by proving the satan’s charge false, and displaying his wisdom, God does by implication, and then by action, vindicate Job.

For God to appear on earth, visibly, and speak to Job in the hearing of his opponents, is for God to have answered Job’s prayer and fulfilled his hope (13:15–18). While a godless man cannot enter God’s court, Job is sure he would be received. The assertion of God’s wisdom in the divine speech mocks the satan’s thesis. It is significant that God affirms that Job has spoken of God what is right but the friends have not (42:7–9). The focus is not on Job but on God. Job’s loyalty to God has been the question all along, amply answered by his persistent refusal to deny the words of the Holy One or his integrity. Those who have attempted to put Job to shame are silenced and rebuked. Clines notes the excessive number of animals required to cover the sins of Job’s accusers, pointing to “the underlying suggestion … that the friends’ error is no mere trivial verbal fault, but a fundamental wrong, which needs the most strenuous sacrificial effort to expunge.”[13] Their error is to have sided with the satan. In denying Job’s integrity, they have impugned the wisdom of God. Their public repentance and need to appeal to Job to act as their intercessor and priest is an act of significant vindication for Job. Regaining double his losses indicates that they were losses suffered by an innocent man. The friends are given grace as well, and in so doing their relationship with Job is restored and Job resumes his social standing with heightened honor. If all of this does not vindicate Job, one wonders what more would be needed. Certainly this list matches Job’s expressed wishes.

Job’s response is not what the friends, or perhaps the reader, might have expected. He does not fall on his face and admit guilt or plead for mercy. Rather, he affirms God’s wisdom, ignores the questions put to him, and assumes his place in expectant silence. As Clines has so amply demonstrated, Job does not repent in response to the divine speeches. Rather, he says,

So I faint [as Job predicted he would in 19:27]
and I am comforted on account of the dust and ashes. (42:6)

The suddenness of the redirection in the transition from Elihu to God, from God to Job and then to the three friends, is breathtaking. Neither has it gone unnoticed that Job’s final words in 42:6 are difficult, if not ambiguous. Morrow and Newsom have argued that the ambiguity here is deliberate.[14] Reading the book of Job as māšāl locates the deliberate ambiguities of the work within a sublime and complex literary design testing the reader’s wisdom and, in so doing, challenging the reader’s understanding of self and of God.

VI. Conclusion

The book of Job may be seen to correlate well with the parables, and indeed the life, of Jesus as presented in the Gospels. In both settings the accused is God himself. The scandal that provokes such hostile debate is the concept that both suffering and salvation are delivered according to God’s plans and purposes and are, in the experience of the recipients of God’s favor, gratuitous. For those committed to a concept requiring God to submit to the same rules of fair play that apply to human relationships, the book of Job and the Gospels present a scandalous portrayal of God as autonomous. Clines’s reaction to God’s autonomy and aseity as asserted so profoundly in the book of Job appreciates the Creator-creature distinction while evocatively expressing the scandal such a concept must be to any who would hold the Creator accountable to a human construction of justice.

For the reader of the book of Job, the person and experience of Job draw the mind’s eye away so as to supplant the governing context. In the construction of the author, however, it is not Job who is on trial at all. Rather, it is God. Job’s integrity is presented as evidence of the wisdom of God and the foolishness of the satan. More than that, God puts Job forward before the charge is laid. The satan, by implication, is the fool, drawn into a trap as he charges God with foolishness in the denial that any human could ever be blameless. Attempts to reconcile God’s actions and Job’s suffering with human constructions of justice are the distracter in the māšāl, highlighting the failure of the reader to adequately appreciate the aseity, autonomy, and wisdom of God as asserted by the author. The reader’s response to the author’s presentation is another matter entirely.

Notes

1. David J. A. Clines, Job 38-42, WBC 18b (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 1218.
2. Claire Colebrook, Irony (London: Routledge, 2006), 12, 18-19.
3. Timothy Polk, “Paradigms, Parables, and Mešalim: On Reading the Mašal in Scripture,” CBQ 45 (1983): 564-83.
4. Carolyn J. Sharp, Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 8, 13.
5. Colebrook, Irony, 46.
6. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, ed. Robert Burchfield, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 415.
7. David J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, WBC 18a (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 594.
8. Ibid., 650.
9. Clines, Job 38-42, 1213-14, 1218; Clines, Job 21-37, 594.
10. John B. Curtis, “On Job’s Response to Yahweh,” JBL 98 (1979): 505.
11. Clines, Job 38-42, 1088.
12. David R. Jackson, “Who Is This Who Darkens Counsel? The Use of Rhetorical Irony in God’s Charges Against Job,” WTJ 72 (2010): 153-67.
13. Clines, Job 38-42, 1231.
14. William Morrow, “Consolation, Rejection, and Repentance in Job 42:6, ” JBL 105 (1986): 225; Carol A. Newsom, “The Book of Job as Polyphonic Text,” JSOT 97 (2002): 107-8.