Have You Considered My Servant Job?

Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience

Samuel E. Balentine, James L. Crenshaw

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781611174519
• eBook ISBN: 9781611174526
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism

An extensive history of how the Bible's story of Job has been interpreted through the ages.
The question that launches Job's story is posed by God at the outset of the story: "Have you considered my servant Job?" (1:8; 2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes. The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading, evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal interpretations of God's providential love. Artists, beginning at least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians—religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of the globe—have added their own distinctive readings.
In Have You Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal characters in the story—Job, God, the satan figure, Job's wife, and Job's friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of the biblical description of these characters, then explores how subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or dismissed them as irrelevant.
Each new generation of readers is shaped by different historical, cultural, and political contexts, which in turn require new interpretations of an old yet continually mesmerizing story. Voltaire read Job one way in the eighteenth century, Herman Melville a different way in the nineteenth century. Goethe's reading of the satan figure in Faust is not the same as Chaucer's in The Canterbury Tales, and neither is fully consonant with the Testament of Job or the Qur'an. One need only compare the descriptions of God in the biblical account with the imaginative renderings by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka to see that the effort to understand why God afflicts Job "for no reason" (2:3) continues to be both compelling and endlessly complicated.
"A tour de force of cultural interaction with the book of Job. He guides today's reader along the path of Job interpretation, exegesis, adaptation and imagining revealing the sheer variety of themes, meanings, creativity and re-readings that have been inspired by this one biblical book. Balentine shows us that not only is there "always someone playing Job" (MacLeish, J.B.) but there's always someone, past or present, reading this ever-enigmatic book." —Katharine J. Dell, University of Cambridge
"Balentine "considers Job" for the countless ways this biblical book, in all its rich complexities, has inspired readers over the centuries. . . . Balentine's volume sparkles with insightful theological commentary and rigorous scholarship, and any exegetical course or study on Job would benefit from it." — Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

PART I

Introduction to the Characters in the Didactic Tale (Job 1–2 + Job 42:7–17)

1

THE JOB(S) OF THE DIDACTIC TALE

A Saint in the Making

[The] outstanding and much esteemed history of the saintly Job.

Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia

You are the Emancipator of your God,
And as such I promote you to a saint.

Robert Frost, A Masque of Reason

The Job we meet in the didactic tale that frames the book (Job 1–2 + Job 42:7–17) needs little introduction. In forty-five verses, less than 1 percent of the total book, the Job we perhaps know best emerges. He is a righteous man who endures undeserved affliction without complaint and is in the end restored and rewarded by God. For many readers this one-sentence characterization can be condensed still further—and finalized—with a single phrase: “the patience of Job.” Whether we know this phrase from reading the New Testament (Jas 5:11) or from listening to the proverbial wisdom passed along by our elders, many of us have archived “Job” in our memories under the general rubric “patience.”

“Patience” is, however, an inferred virtue of the Job in the didactic tale. The narrator tells us that both he and God know Job to be “blameless and upright” (1:1, 8; 2:3); that despite undeserved affliction “Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (1:22; cf. 2:10); that when his wife urged him to curse God, he dismissed her as foolish (2:9–10); and that in the end God restored Job’s fortunes and blessed him (42:10,12). In conveying this information, neither the narrator nor God ever use the word patience to describe Job’s character,¹ although both assume to know things about Job that he does not know about himself. The same is true for the satan, who recognizes that Job may be a more complex character than either God or the narrator allow—“Does Job really fear God for nothing?” (1:9)—but in this case the satan claims to know that Job will indeed curse God when his circumstances change. The satan expects Job to be impatient with God, although this is never explicitly stated. Neither does Job describe himself as patient. He speaks the two lines he is given (1:21, 2:10), but in both cases the narrator immediately provides an addendum that effectively removes any consideration of his interior motives. Job did not sin, the narrator assures us (1:22, 2:10), even though “his suffering was very great” (2:13).

The narrator, God, and the satan “narrate Job”; he is for them more an example of the “blameless and upright” man than a person with subjective emotions and motivations. In sum the Job of the didactic tale is a “spectacle,” an object in a “scientific” experiment that will be conducted according to a predetermined set of circumstances. As soon as God poses the opening question, “Have you considered my servant Job?” everyone becomes a voyeur. God watches Job to see what he will do and say; the satan watches Job; and we readers watch the both of them watching Job. We all know more about Job than he knows about himself, and while there may be some uncertainty about specific twists and turns the story might take, we cannot imagine, given the careful structuring of the narrative, anything but a positive ending.²

How then does “the patience of Job” come to be, effectively, the sum truth not only of the didactic tale, but also in many respects of the entire book? Three primary interpretive moves are required. First, interpreters must focus on the framing didactic tale and its account of Job’s piety and fortitude in the face of suffering and loss. Coupled with his ultimate reward and restoration, Job emerges in this reading as a moral exemplar of heroic dimensions; as suggested by the title for this chapter, he is a saint in the making. Second, interpreters must essentially ignore, minimize, or rationalize the “impatient” Job who dominates the poetic dialogues that stand at the center of the book (Job 3–42:6).³ His complaints about God’s justice, his doubts about God’s presence, and his determination to establish his own innocence by prosecuting God’s guilt must be viewed as a regrettable but understandable character flaw. It is a sin of temporary despair, which is overcome by Job’s repentance and redeemed by God’s forgiveness. In this reading even a rebellious Job remains a paragon of patience, a reminder that fortitude trumps human frailty in the divine economy. Third, for interpreters to identify patience as the most important and imitable Joban virtue, they must successfully argue that Job’s patience sets a principled precedent that transcends the particular circumstances of any one time or place. Such patience must have a generic suasion that reaches across historical and cultural contingencies, beyond ethnic and religious identities. The point may be sharpened by referring once more to James 5:11, the single mention of Job in the New Testament. When the author of this epistle says to his first-century audience, “You have heard of the patience of Job,” he must be able to assume that they know the word patience is a sufficient summation of the entire story.

In different ways and for various reasons, early Jewish and Christian exegetes made each of these interpretive moves. Beginning with the LXX and still more decisively with the T. Job, patience emerges as the dominant trope for reading Job. Rabbinic interpretation both informed early Christian exegesis and reacted to it. By the time of the Latin fathers of the church (Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great), the accent on Job’s patience and fortitude was so deeply rooted in the interpretive tradition that it would not be dislodged until the nineteenth century, when historical-critical approaches placed the unity of the book and thus its presumed unitary focus under close scrutiny. Contemporary biblical scholarship has tended to dismiss the “patient Job” as a relic of the very orthodoxy the “rebellious Job” of the dialogues refuses to embrace. We will assess this alternative characterization of Job in subsequent chapters, but first it is instructive to recognize that the “patience of Job” has long been, and likely will remain, an enormously generative summons to heroic, saintly virtues that no society, ancient or modern, can afford to erase from its collective memory.⁴

“Patience Is Better than Anything” (T. Job 27:7)

Early rabbinic commentators were well aware of the contradictions between the pious and God-fearing Job of the prose tale and the rebellious Job of the rest of the book. While Christian interpreters from the second to the nineteenth centuries largely resolved this issue by minimizing or ignoring the poetic dialogues, the rabbis, “as conscientious exegetes … had perforce to read the Hebrew book of Job as it stood.”⁵

At the center of what proved to be an unresolved debate among the rabbis was the question about Job’s origins. The Hebrew book describes Job as a non-Israelite from the “land of Uz,” a Gentile who was a worshipper of Israel’s God YHWH (1:1, 21). Some rabbinic commentators regarded Job, along with Abraham and Joseph, as one of three persons who were “God-fearing” (Gen. Rabbah 21). Others viewed Job as the most pious Gentile who ever lived (Deut. Rabbah 2:4). As a righteous Gentile, Job demonstrates that it is possible to be a faithful worshipper of the one true God even outside the boundaries of Israel. He is regarded, for example, as one of the seven Gentile prophets who prophesied to the nations before the Torah was given to Israel. The seven are identified as “Balaam and his father; Job from the land of Uz; and Eliphaz the Temanite; and Bildad the Shuhite; and Zophar the Naamathite; and Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite” (Seder ‘Olam Rabbah 21). Other rabbis, convinced that a man with Job’s virtues must have been an Israelite, argued that he was one of the Israelite prophets, along with Elijah, who preached to the Gentiles (Baba Batra 15b). Still others insisted that because Job is described as a “whole-hearted” or “perfect” man (tām [Job 1:1]), he must have been born circumcised (’Abot de Rabbi Nathan 2).

The rabbis could not ignore, however, Job’s suffering, which in rabbinic thinking could not be gratuitous. Job must have sinned, thus meriting his affliction as part of God’s inviolable justice. Raba interpreted Job 2:10—“In all this Job did not sin with his lips”—to mean that he did sin within his heart; because God knew that Job would soon open his mouth to speak curses (cf. Job 3), God was justified in punishing him (Baba Batra 16a). Some rabbinic accounts trace Job’s origins to the time of Moses, when he was said to have served as one of Pharaoh’s counselors, along with two other Gentiles, Jethro and Balaam, during the time of the Israelite’s enslavement (B. Soṭah 11a; B. Sanhedrin 106a; Exod. Rabbah 1:9). Balaam is said to have persuaded Pharaoh to issue the decree that all male children be drowned. For this he is remembered as the model of the wicked Gentiles who seek the destruction of the people of Israel. When the decree was issued, Jethro is said to have fled Pharaoh’s court, renounced his former life, and joined the Jewish community. He thus becomes the model of the Gentile proselyte to Judaism. Job, by contrast, is reported to have been silent in the face of Pharaoh’s decree. He is punished by God because he did nothing to prevent Israel’s affliction.

In a similar line of argumentation, the rabbis recognize Job’s reputation for righteousness but qualify it as less than that exemplified by Israel’s revered ancestors. Baskin cites a comment from Pesiqta Rabbati 47 as typical:

The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Job: Why raisest thou a cry? Because suffering befell thee? Dost thou then perhaps consider thyself greater than Adam, the creation of my own hands? Because of a single command that he made nothing of, I decreed death for him and his progeny. Yet he did not raise a cry. Or consider thyself greater than Abraham? Because he ventured to say “Whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?” (Gen 15:8), I put him to trial after trial… . Yet he did not raise a cry. Or consider thyself greater than Isaac? Because he persisted in loving Esau I made his eyes dim… . Or consider thyself greater than Moses? Because he spoke in anger to Israel, saying, “Hear now, ye rebels” (Num 20:10), I decreed as punishment for him that he could not enter into the land. Yet he did not raise a cry.⁶

If Job had not complained, as this discussion goes on to make clear, then he would have been listed along with the ancestors of Israel in the daily prayers of the faithful. People would have prayed “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob and God of Job.” Job’s complaints, especially his remonstrations against God, were an indication to some that he served God out of fear, not love, that his righteousness was a careful and calculated hedge against losing his possessions. Devotion motivated by fear crumbles under the weight of adversity; it reveals a man who claims to be righteous not only as a fraud but also a rebel. Rabbi Akiba compares Job’s love for God to that of Abraham and others and finds him wanting. When God ordered Abraham to offer his only son Isaac as a burnt offering, he was silent (Gn 22); when God afflicted Hezekiah, he begged God for mercy (2 Kgs 20); but when God sent suffering to Job, he “remonstrated when punished, as it is said, ‘I will say unto God; Do not condemn me; make me to know wherefore Thou contendest with me’ (Job 10:2)” (Semahot 8; Midrash Ṭeharot 26:2). Because of such rebellion, Akiba identified Job with the wicked, such as Gog and Magog, who were punished in Gehenna (M. ‘Edduyot 2:10). Baba Batra 15b makes a similar case against Job by arguing that even if he was the most righteous of Gentiles, he forfeited life in the world to come because he questioned God’s justice.⁷

This overview of rabbinic interpretation may be sufficient to confirm Baskin’s assertion that “there are almost as many Jobs as Rabbis who speak about him.”⁸ The rabbis’ inability, or refusal, to resolve the differences between the pious and patient Job of the prose narrative and the defiant and impatient Job of the poetic dialogues was likely influenced by, even as it contributed to, the more pietistic and more unitary focus on the “saintly” Job that began to take root in early Jewish and Christian communities with the appearance of the LXX and the T. Job. We turn to these rereadings of Job in the following paragraphs, but before doing so it is instructive to consider Baskin’s caveat:

Such texts as the Testament of Job [and the LXX] … glorified the pious sufferer of Job 1 and 42 as an innocent and paradigmatic model of patience under duress. The outraged and outspoken Job of the rest of the book is totally ignored in these works, which had an immense impact on Christian views of Job. The rabbinic respect for Scripture could not sanction so cavalier an approach to holy writ, and instead demanded descriptions of Job’s obvious wrongdoings, justifications of his undoubtedly deserved punishment, and condemnations of his intemperate and occasionally blasphemous complaining. The flawed figure who thus emerged explains the hesitation some Rabbis felt to grant Job full forgiveness and access to the world to the come. At the same time the rather one-dimensional Job, championed by the authors of those pietistic texts, and their adherents, was also disavowed.⁹

The LXX is the oldest surviving translation of Job, and as such it represents an early move toward elevating the patient Job over the impatient Job. The Greek translators produced not only a shorter version of the Hebrew text,¹⁰ they also changed its characterization of Job by supplying information not found in rabbinic sources and by subtly softening or eliminating many of Job’s impious statements. Two significant additions are made to the prose tale, the most important of which for our purposes here is the addendum in Job 42:17a–e.¹¹ Where the Hebrew text ends with the words “and Job died, old and full of days,” the LXX adds “And it is written that he will rise again with those the Lord raises up” (42:17a).¹² The affirmation that Job’s suffering finds its ultimate reward in his resurrection effectively removes a major tension in the book. If all present wrongs are righted when Job rises again, then, as Baskin notes, “the central issue of the Book of Job, the existence of unjustified suffering in the universe of a just God, is neatly vitiated.”¹³

The addendum continues by supplying a genealogy for Job that identifies him with Jobab of Genesis 36:33–34 (LXX 42:17b–c).¹⁴ We have seen above that the rabbis debated Job’s origins, some arguing that he was a righteous Gentile (though not as righteous as Abraham), others that his very righteousness indicated he must be an Israelite. The LXX translators move beyond this question by linking Job’s righteousness, as a Gentile descended from Esau, the eponymous ancestor of the Edomites, to Abraham. With Job’s being fifth in descent from Abraham, virtually all arguments negatively comparing Job to Abraham are muted.

The T. Job (first century B.C.E.–first century C.E.) clearly draws upon the LXX. Like the LXX the Testament identifies Job with Jobab of Genesis 36 (e.g., T. Job 2:1; LXX Job 42:17d); it reproduces and embellishes the LXX’s version of the speech of Job’s wife (T. Job 21–25, 39–40; LXX Job 2:9a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• Prologue: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job”
• Part I: Introduction to the Characters in the Didactic Tale (Job 1–2 + Job 42:7–17)
• Part II: Center Stage: The Wisdom Dialogue (Job 3–42:6)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index