Job: Introduction

1.2 A Brief Introduction

Space and Time

Just about any book can be better appreciated by locating it in spacetime. I always check the copyright date after reading the jacket cover and before starting the preface. Job is an exception. We are given a Hebrew manuscript, in a nondescript location in "the land of Uz", (which always reminds me of a famous fairy tale) that has no historical precedents. Then we are given no temporal help at all, no kings, no kingdoms, no other historical references. The dialogue is reminiscent of the stories of God talking to Abram, definitely pre-Mosaic covenant, so many scholars put it in the patriarchal period. Linguistic studies of word usage suggest some influence from Edom, and place it in the south, somewhere in that millennium. It could have been written much later, say, during the monarchy, but placed in a patriarchal setting. Clues are so scarce, one might even believe that it was intentionally vague. It is as if the writer were telling us, "Forget the Mosaic Law, forget the covenant of circumcision, this could have happened to anyone, anywhere, at any time, this could have been you."

Ancient Librarians

The position of the Book of Job in the Bible reflects the difficulty that ancient scholars had when they attempted to group together similar books. Is Job a historical book, a poetic book, a prophetic book, or a wisdom book (e.g., Proverbs)? In the English Bible it is sandwiched between history and poetry using St. Jerome's order, but in previous editions it surfaced between poetry and prophets (Septuagint), or between songs and wisdom (Alexandria), or between law and history (Peshitta).

Why is it so difficult to classify? Harrison writes, "The book derived its title from the Hebrew name of its principle character, and by any standard of comparison it ranks among the most significant pieces of world literature. Certainly it is unmatched in the writings of the Old Testament for its artistic character, its grandeur of language, depth of feeling, and the sensitivity with which the meaning of human suffering is explored...Pfeiffer held the book to be one of the most original works in the entire corpus of human poetry, and of such a kind as to defy classification in terms of lyric, epic, poetic, reflective, or didactic categories." But couldn't the book be all of the above and still be easily classified? This is an important clue, and perhaps one worth delving into.

What is literary classification? Plato would have said that it is recognizing that this piece of human literature reflects some aspect of the divine literature, a poor reflection of God's library. Aristotle would have said that God's library is all in our heads, that we unconsciously group together items so as to make more efficient use of our brain cells. But perhaps the two fellows are not that far apart. Computer scientists have spent decades trying to get million dollar computers to recognize, say, a horse. According to Scientific American, they succeed only 30% of the time, they cannot duplicate what an average 2 year old is capable of. Perhaps it is Plato's divine gift to maximize Aristotle's brain cells. In any case, we develop categories based on experience and common use.

Whether I knew it or not at the time, my first stumbling attempt at writing rhyming verse to a lady joined centuries of previous efforts in the category of "bad love poetry." It was new to me, but a well-known classification. Is it possible then, to do something unique, say, to write rhyming verse to a pig and start the category "porcine poetry"? Certainly it's possible. If you succeed in starting a trend you get elected professor; if you don't, you must rejoin the work force and your effort gets classified with "miscellaneous bad poetry" anyway. If then Job is impossible to classify, I draw three conclusions: that he must have started a trend that was impossible to duplicate; that everyone applied a different category to which no two can agree; and that he did too good a job to be thrown into the miscellaneous bin with all the other riffraff. Let me rephrase this. If no one will relegate the book to the miscellaneous bin, then I think it is fair to call this book "objectively excellent". If, on the other hand, no one can agree as to a category, I would call it "subjectively understood". And if it has never been duplicated, thereby starting a trend, I would call it "divinely inspired".

Modern Librarians

Has this ever been done before? Let me admit my bias and say that I believe St. John the Divine's gospel bears the same relationship to the other gospels as Job's book bears to wisdom literature. He took an existing format and modified it to his own, very subjective purpose with a genius that can only be divinely inspired. If I can be permitted to coin a phrase, this "transformational" genre is more common in world literature than perhaps is appreciated. I just finished reading a novel to my children and noted that the jacket cover had the quote "Few books could be easier to enjoy or harder to describe than C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces." which then goes on to make the three points above. What makes this genre so difficult to replicate is the very subjectivity of the treatment. No, I'm not saying that using the first person is unique, but that the book is written to elicit a subjective response, a reaction that inserts the reader into the story to become a participant. This is a "meta-genre" based not so much on the objective content of the book, but on the subjective response of the reader.

Now if the response desired is transparently obvious, we would call this type of literature "propaganda" or "educational", depending on our bent. Wisdom literature falls into this infinitely repeated, obvious category. The writer of Job then, bases his book on the well-known characteristics of wisdom literature in order to spring his trap on us; he uses our tendency to ask "where's the moral?" to draw us into this amoral morass where God speaks riddles and men speak the truth. Transformational literature, unlike wisdom literature, does not reveal to us something we already know, but changes what we already know into something else. Since wisdom literature was the writer's starting point, let us then examine some of the characteristics of this genre.

¹ R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament

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