Job in the Ancient World

The Image of the Biblical Job A History

Volume One: Job in the Ancient World

Stephen J. Vicchio

Job in the Ancient World

The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume One

Copyright © 2006 Stephen J. Vicchio. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

ISBN: 1-59752-532-4

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7655-9

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Vicchio, Stephen J.

Job in the ancient world / Stephen J. Vicchio.

Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006

xii + 254 p. ; 23 cm. —(The image of the biblical job: a history ; v. 1)

ISBN 1-59752-532-4 (alk. paper)

1. Bible. O.T. Job—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. O.T. Job— Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History. 3. Bible. O.T. Job—Theology. I. Title. II. Series.

BS1415.2 V53 2006

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Problem of Evil

Images of Job in Western History

Textual Difficulties in the Book of Job

The Contents of Volume One

Chapter 1: Parallels to Job in Ancient Literature

Introduction

Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom Literature

Book of Job and Wisdom Literature

Hebrew Parallels to Job

Ancient Egyptian Parallels

Babylonian Parallels

Other Ancient Parallels

Job as a Greek Tragedy

Conclusions

Chapter 2: The Setting of the Book of Job

Introduction

The Geography of Ancient Israel

The Setting of Job

Theodicy in the Hebrew Bible

Conclusions

Chapter 3: Job in the Masoretic Text: A Search for the Original Text

Introduction

The Nature and Uses of the Masoretic Text

The Development of the Masoretic Texts

A Comparison of the Asher and Naphtali Versions of Job

Conclusions

Chapter 4: A Reading of Job in Its Time and Place

Introduction

The Prose Prologue (1:1-5)

The Initial Wager and Second Bet (1:6—2:8)

Job’s Wife and the Introduction of the Comforters (2:9-13)

The Speeches of the Comforters (4–25)

Job’s Final Response to the Friends (26–31)

The Speeches of Elihu (32–37)

The Voice from the Whirlwind (38–41)

The Prose Epilogue (42:6-17)

Conclusions

Chapter 5: Job in the Septuagint

Introduction

The Nature and Origins of the Septuagint

Other Greek Translations

The Allegorical Interpretation of Scripture

The Septuagint Job

Why is the Septuagint Job Shorter than the Hebrew Version?

Theological Differences in the LXX’s Job

A Unified Theory of the Shorter Greek Job

The Septuagint’s Additions to Job

Conclusions

Chapter 6: Job in the Jewish Apocrypha

Introduction

Sirach and the Biblical Job

Tobit and the Biblical Job

The Testament of Job

Aristeas’ Life of Job

Conclusions

Chapter 7: Job in Early Christianity: The First Four Centuries

Introduction

The Epistle of James and Job

Clement of Rome’s First Letter and Job

The Apocalypse of Paul and Job

Conclusions

Chapter 8: Job in the Talmud and Midrash

Introduction

The Nature of the Talmud and Midrash

When Did Job Live?

Job’s Nationality

Was Job an Iconoclast or a Patient Sufferer?

What Was the Cause of Job’s Suffering?

Other Issues in the Rabbinic Sources

The Targum on Job

Conclusions

Chapter 9: Job in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Introduction

The Discovery, Dating, and Provenance of the Qumran Targumim on Job

The Job Fragments of Cave 4 and the Masoretic Text

The Cave 11 Targum and Job

Conclusions

Chapter 10: Job in the Peshitta

Introduction

The Origins of the Peshitta

The Peshitta’s Job and the Hebrew Text

The Theological Significance of the Peshitta’s Job

Conclusions

Appendix A: Job in Art and Architecture

Introduction

Job in Early Christian Art

Job in Late Medieval Art and Architecture

Job in Art of the Modern Period

Job in Twentieth-Century Art

Appendix B: Job in Western Music

Introduction

Job and the Patron Saint of Music

Job in Music before the Renaissance

Job in the Sixteenth-Century Motet

Job in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music

Job in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music

In memory of Sister Virgina Geiger (1915–2004) and Marvin Pope (1916–1997), two fine teachers and fine friends.

Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for over thirty years. In the course of its writing, I have incurred many debts. Some to my teacher, Marvin Pope. Other debts include friends and colleagues: Sister Virgina Geiger, Lucinda Edinberg, Ashley Simmons, Becky Potter, Tryn Lashley, and, most importantly, my wife Sandra, and my two sons, Reed and Jack. It is through them I continue to find meaning and goodness in life.

In an essay on the Book of Job written by Thomas Carlyle, the Englishman wrote A Noble Book; All Men’s Book! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. I think Carlyle was right about that.

SJV

Easter Sunday, 2005

Baltimore

Introduction

The question of generations: Why do we suffer what we suffer? is not a philosophical interrogatory, but a religious concern about the character of God.

—Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith

In the Fall of 1971, at the age of twenty-one, I attended a lecture on the book of Job, given by Robert Gordis, a famous twentieth-century scholar of Hebrew Wisdom literature, and Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York for many years. After the lecture was over, I approached Dr. Gordis and asked, How do I become like you when I grow up? Professor Gordis answered, Learn Hebrew, and read the book of Job over and over again.

Two years later, I was a student at Yale Divinity School. Marvin Pope, another renowned Job scholar, was my Hebrew teacher. By the Spring of 1976, I knew enough Hebrew to take Mr. Pope’s seminar on the book of Job.

For the next ten years I continued to take Professor Gordis’s advice. I continued to study Hebrew on my own, and I read the book of Job many times. Along the way, I received a Ph.D. from St. Mary’s College of Saint Andrews University in Scotland. The topic of my dissertation was The Problem of Evil.

I began my teaching career in the Fall of 1973. For the past thirty-two years, most of my academic writing, as well as my teaching, were connected to the problem of evil: If God is all good, all knowing, and all powerful, then why is there so much suffering in the world? My senior thesis in college was about the question, as was my Master’s thesis. For the last 31 years I have spent most of my academic life reading about how various readers in the history of Western scholarship have understood the biblical book of Job. For the last thirty-two years, then, I have followed Robert Gordis’s advice.

The work I have done over the years is not so much about the book of Job, as it is watching people read the book, and then talk or write about what they think it means. I have attempted over the last three decades to write a history of the interpretation of Job from the third century BCE, to the present.

My work has included traditional sources like the Septuagint, the third-century BCE translation of the Hebrew Job into Greek; the Talmud; the Dead Sea Scrolls; Gregory the Great’s Moralia on Job; the image of Job in the Qur’an; Moses Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed; and many others. My study has also included works on Job by painters, sculptors, musicians, and composers. If someone in the history of the West has written about Job, or created a piece of art about Job, it is likely that someone’s view is in this book.

In this first volume of my work, Job in the Ancient World, we trace Judaic and Christian interpretations of the book of Job, from the making of the Septuagint, to Jerome’s translation of Job into Latin in the fourth and fifth centuries. In the second volume, Job in the Medieval World, I explore the Job image in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, from the fifth to fifteenth centuries. In the third and final volume, Job in the Modern World, I trace the history of Job’s interpretation from the Reformation to the late nineteenth century.

All three volumes of this work have appendices attached to them. Among these are: Job in Art and Architecture; Job in Music; Job in Literature; Job in Zoology; Job and Geography; and Job and Medicine.

Job and Zoology is principally concerned with the history of what interpreters have had to say about the identity of Leviathan and Behemoth in chapters 40 and 41 of Job. Job and Geography is dedicated to what exegetes have said about the location of the land of Uz. Job and Medicine explores the history of what various Jews, Christians and Muslims have had to say about the nature of Job’s sores. The other appendices are histories of how the Job image has been used in those disciplines.

The Problem of Evil

One way to organize the different things people have said or written about the book of Job is to do four things. First, to look at the various ways people have tried to answer the problem of evil in the West. Second, to look at a number of images of the biblical Job that continue to reappear in the history of the West. Third, the writers of Job seem adamant about the lack of survival of death in the book, while most exegetes find survival, either resurrection or immortality, in Job. And finally, to look at what interpreters have said about certain textual ambiguities in the book of Job.

In the history of Western philosophy, eight major answers to the problem of evil, or theodicies, appear. These answers can be divided into two kinds: those that look backward in time (deontological answers) to discover the cause of innocent suffering, and those that look forward (teleological answers). Those eight answers look something like this:

Backward Looking Forward Looking (Deontological Responses) (Teleological Responses)1. Retributive Justice 5. Contrast View 2. Original Sin 6. the Test Theodicy 3. the Free Will Defense 7. the Moral Qualities View 4. the influence of Demonic Forces 8. the Divine Plan Answer

Theory one suggests that the reason people suffer is because they, or a member of their family or clan, has done something wrong. Original Sin that the cause of suffering is the first sin of Adam and Eve—that their sin is inherited by all who came after them. The free will defense argues that God gave humans free will and the cause of most human suffering is the moral decisions made by human beings, using their free will. Theory four says that the major cause of human suffering is the influence of demonic beings, like Satan or the Devil, on human behavior.

The Contrast View argues that we have to have evil and suffering to know what good and happiness are. Without evil, the good would not exist. The Test Theodicy says that the reason for suffering is to test human beings to see if they are really good, while the Moral Qualities View argues that the purpose of suffering is to make someone a better person. The Divine Plan point of View says that God has a Divine Plan, whereby all suffering and evil is part of this plan which turns out for the good.

The first four responses are called Deontological because each answer sees that there are intrinsic moral qualities to both goodness and evil. In the history of philosophy in the West, a deontological answer to the problem of evil is held by one who believes that there are universal moral rules. A good example of this view is Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. A teleological response to the problem of evil is one based on consequences, how things turn out, rather than based on moral rules. John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, that we ought to produce the most happiness for the most number of people, is the best example of a teleological theory of ethics.

All eight of these theodicies can be found in the book of Job. All eight of these answers to the problem of evil mentioned above, also appear repeatedly in the history of Western interpretation. Indeed, all theodicies in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in one way or another, are versions of the eight answers outlined above.

There are also a number of images of the figure of Job in Western interpretation and iconography. These images show up repeatedly in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpretations of the man from Uz. It is to these images, we will now turn.

Images of Job in Western History

In the history of the West, the most popular images of Job in the ancient world are: Job the Patient, or the Saintly Job; Job the Angry, or Job the Iconoclast; Job the Wrestler, or athlete for God; and Jobus Christus (Job as a Christ figure). The first of these is the tradition that Job was a holy and patient saint, as he is portrayed in the prose prologue and epilogue of the book, as well as most of Christian history. The second image, Job the iconoclast, or Job, the angry, was mostly spawned by the poetic body of the text, where Job is angry at God and his friends. In this view Job is primarily seen as a man who proclaims his innocence, to God and his friends. This view of Job arises in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources. The earliest text depicting this view is the Talmud, where ancient rabbis saw both the patient Job and the Angry Job. The Angry Job image can also be seen in later Jewish commentaries on Job in the High Middle Ages. The third image, that Job is a Wrestler or Athlete for God, probably began in Alexandria in Hellenistic times, and can be seen in the first several centuries of Christianity, as can the depicting of Job as a Christ figure. The Job as Wrestler motif is seen first in the Jewish apocryphal work, The Testament of Job, and can be seen throughout Christian Medieval iconography and commentaries. Gregory the Great’s Moralia and Medieval illustrations of Prudentius’ Psychomachia are good examples of the Job as Wrestler motif.

Job is also sometimes depicted in the West as a Christ figure. Again, Gregory’s commentary is an excellent example of this image, as are most Christian commentaries on Job from the seventh to twelfth centuries, as well as much of Western art using the book of Job. By the modern period these images of Job were largely supplemented and replaced with new ones: Job, the Romantic; Job, the Existentialist; and the Post-Holocaust Job, among others. More is said about these images of Job in Volume Three of this work.

Textual Difficulties in the Book of Job

One final element deserves some mention in this introduction. The Hebrew text of Job, which we have inherited from two groups of Medieval scholars called the Masoretes, is perhaps the most corrupt book in the Hebrew Bible, with the possible exception of Hosea. Words, and even entire speeches are missing from the book. Some portions of Job make no syntactic sense. Some ambiguous Hebrew words can be read in more than one or even two, ways. Often these textual difficulties come at precisely the most crucial points in the text.

It is likely that Job has come to us as a blending of two traditions, an ancient folk tale of the prose, and the poetic body of the text, where Job argues with his friends. The Job of the prose (chapters 1 and 2 and 42:7-17) is a patient and holy man, one who fears God and shuns evil; the Job of the poetry (chapters 3 to 42:6) is angry, at God and at his friends.

A number of other difficulties are presented in the Hebrew Job. In the opening line, the text tells us that Job was blameless and upright. Interpreters have disagreed over what these two Hebrew terms, tam and yashar mean. The identity of the Satan in the book of Job is not entirely clear. Is he an agent of God, or is he an ancient accuser?

Job’s wife in 2:9 suggests that the patriarch should curse God and die. But some interpreters point out that the word barak means both bless and curse in ancient Hebrew. Some scholars have argued that Job 14:14; 19:25-27; and 42:17 all point to Job’s belief in survival after death, while the Hebrew text seems to argue that he does not. All interpreters agree that Job’s answer to God appears in 42:5-6, but there is a wide collection of opinions about what those verses mean. Some scholars say that Job in his final speech gives in to the superior wisdom and power of God, while others say Job remains adamant to the last.

There are other textual difficulties as well. There is no direct object in 42:6a, what most scholars agree is the punch line of the book; in the three rounds of speeches between Job and his friends, the third speech from Zophar is missing; there are three speeches from Eliphaz and Bildad, as well as three responses from Job. But there are only two speeches from Zophar. Chapter 28, a Hymn to Wisdom, has nothing to do with the rest of the work; and Elihu, Job’s fourth friend, (chapters 32–37), seems like an addition. Some see him as an agent of Satan, while others argue that Elihu merely reiterates the speeches of the other three friends.

One way to look at the history of the interpretation of the book of Job is to ask these questions: first, what answer to the problem of evil does the interpreter seem to suggest? Secondly, which of the Job images does the interpreter prefer? Does he/she see the Patient Job, the Angry Job, or both? Does the reader see Job as a wrestler for God, or as a Christ-figure? And, finally, what does the interpreter do with these textual difficulties and ambiguities we have mentioned above?

In this first volume, these are precisely the questions we shall ask. As we shall see, some interpreters see Job as patient, some as angry, and some as both; some argue for retributive justice, while others prefer the Divine Plan theory; some see Job as taking back all that he has said in 42:6a, while others think Job despises himself. Some suggest that Job is without sin because he is blameless and upright, while others point that Job’s transgressions, or that he suffers from original sin, are the causes of Job’s suffering.

One other issue that considerable time and energy is devoted to in this work is the view that various exegetes have on the role of survival after death in the biblical Job. In the original Hebrew, as we suggest in chapter four of this volume, there is no evidence that Job believes in a life beyond the grave. The view of death in the Masoretic text is decidedly naturalistic

Several passages in Job, however, suggest the possibility of survival, principally, 14:14 and 19:25-27. Another way, then, to compare points of view about the man from Uz is to see what an individual exegete or translator has to say about these passages.

In the end, the book of Job has become a series of mirrors in the West. Whatever a particular interpreter brings to the text, his background, theological preconceptions, and expectations of the book, are, in general, precisely what they find in the book. For the most part, interpreters of Job thought they were reading his book when, in reality, they are simply looking in the mirror, finding their own values, theology, and attitudes toward innocent suffering, looking back.

The Contents of Volume One

In this first volume, we explore the image of Job in the ancient world. The first four chapters deal with precursors to Job in ancient Near Eastern literature; placing Job in its time and place; a search for a Mustercodex, an original version of the book of Job; and a reading of Job in its time and place. These first four chapters are a kind of introduction to the book of Job.

The other six chapters of this volume are primarily about interpretation of the book of Job. These chapters are about: Job and the Septuagint; the figure of Job in the Jewish Apocrypha; Job in Early Christianity; Job fragments among the Dead Sea Scrolls; Job’s treatment in the Talmud; and Job in the ancient Syriac, the Peshitta’s version of the Book of Job.

As we shall see, Jewish interpretations of the man from Uz in the ancient materials are very different from Christian views of Job. The ancient rabbis, as they were with any other important theological matters, primarily were concerned about four or five issues about the book, issues that Christian exegetes were not concerned. The image of Job in early Christianity is primarily concerned with the Patient Job, as well as Job the Wrestler.

In addition to these ten chapters, there are also two appendices included in this volume. In the first we explore the image of Job in Western Art and Architecture. In the other, we discuss the uses of the book of Job in the history of Western Music. The materials in these appendices, for the most part, mirror the written sources discussed in the body of the book.

1

Parallels to Job in Ancient Literature

The Bible cannot be properly studied or understood apart from its background and environment which comprises the whole ancient Near East. Since the middle of the last century, a great deal of new light has been shed on the Bible, especially on the Old Testament, by recovery of considerable portions of the ancient literatures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia.

—Marvin Pope, Job

The author of the book of Job knows what people think, what people say in whispers—and not just in Israel.

—Christian Duquoc, Demonism and the Unexpectedness of God

Introduction

It is usually taken for granted that the book of Job has deep roots in ancient Hebrew language and culture. Although a small number of commentators, both ancient and modern, have suggested an authorship outside ancient Palestine, ¹ most writers on the book of Job have thought it to be a Hebrew work. The ancient Jews, however, did not live in isolation. Israel was situated at a central cultural highway linking the northern Fertile Crescent to Egypt in the south. The religion and literature of ancient Israel had many precursors elsewhere in the Near East.

Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hebrew Bible was one of the only known repositories of literary materials from the cultures of the ancient Near East. With Napoleon’s expeditions to Egypt in the early nineteenth century, the discipline of Near Eastern Studies was born. Since that time, the combined expertise of archaeologists, anthropologists, philologists, geographers, historians, and theologians has brought to light thousands of documents and artifacts from Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. We now possess a great deal of information about life in the Fertile Crescent, beginning around 3000 BCE.

In this opening chapter we do the following things: first, we discuss the nature of ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature; second we talk briefly about the book of Job as wisdom literature; finally, we make some observations about parallels to Job in the Hebrew Bible, as well as elsewhere in the ancient Near East.

Ancient Near Eastern Wisdom Literature

Throughout the ancient Near East there were two separate kinds of Wisdom literature. The first variety is usually called Prudential literature. It usually involves practical advice for the young on how to attain a successful and good life. Examples of this genre are the Egyptian Amen-em-opet; the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom; and biblical book of Proverbs.

The other form of Near Eastern Wisdom is Reflective literature. These texts most often involve a reflective probing into the depth of the deepest of human questions: the meaning of life, and the nature and meaning of suffering, for example. The Babylonian Theodicy, the Egyptian Dispute Over Suicide, and the biblical books of Job and Ecclesiastes are good examples of this form.

One important realization to arise from the deciphering of various languages and literatures of the ancient Near East is that the Egyptians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Edomites, Canaanites, Greeks, Hurrians, and Hittites all possessed a brand of what might loosely be called wisdom literature. Beginning with the Egyptian Pyramid Age (2600–2175 BCE) and the Sumerian Era in Mesopotamia (3000–2300 BCE), wisdom writings circulated far beyond the times and places in which they were written.

In general terms, ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature had a number of family-resemblance characteristics,² or traits shared across geographical and cultural boundaries, which give these disparate pieces of literature a certain similarity. First, wisdom literature is primarily about the individual. It tends to provide the portrait of a single soul trying to make sense of an often hostile environment. Second, Wisdom literature most often addresses ultimate questions—what Paul Tillich has so aptly called boundary situations: the destiny of human beings, the nature of death, and the meaning of human suffering. As Bernhard Anderson puts it:

Wisdom is the concern of Man as Man: Greek or Jew, Babylonian or Egyptian, male or female, king or slave. The quest for wisdom is the quest for the meaning of life. And this quest if the basic interest of every human being.³

Third, in most of Near Eastern wisdom literature there is a premium on honesty. Rather than offering clichés or a deus ex machina to solve the larger issues raised by the text, it tends to be evaluative and summative. In this sense, Near Eastern wisdom literature is most often an honest portrayal of actual experience, with the lament employed more often than songs of praise or confessions of faith.

Because the emphasis in wisdom literature is usually on the individual, it does not, for the most part, concern itself with the larger sweep of history Once again, Anderson describes the genre succinctly and eloquently:

Wisdom literature did not have an historical perspective. The sage brought history of a standstill, so to speak, in order to analyze in depth the problem of human existence. He was not concerned with the unrepeatable events and the dynamic movement of a people’s unique history but with the recurring experiences and the fixed moral order in which every individual participates.⁴

A fourth noteworthy aspect of ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature is its tendency to provide practical counsel in trying situations.⁵ Rather than theoretical speculation or metaphysical pronouncements, wisdom literature usually offers a way of surviving the current situation. Sometimes this involves little more than the advice to keep one’s head low when in the presence of the gods. In other instances it involves knowing the proper ritual prescriptions for appeasing those gods. In either case, wisdom literature often presents the reader with practical advice on how to deal with real suffering.

A fifth characteristic of both ancient Near Eastern and Hebrew wisdom literature is that in general wisdom literature has little to do with organized religion. Thus, references to the covenant, or the patriarchs, for example, are rare in Ancient Hebrew literature. This characteristic is directly related to the notion that wisdom literature tends to be individualistic.

Finally, ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature involves a fearless use of reason in confronting the fundamental issues of life, as well as a refusal to pretend certainty when none is to be found. The writers of Near Eastern wisdom texts for the most part exhibited a refreshing allegiance to the truth, whatever it might bring.

From this short description of Near Eastern wisdom literature, it should be clear that biblical wisdom, hokmah, is part of a larger and older tradition. The precise relationship between particular biblical texts and specific ancient Near Eastern literature outside Palestine, however, is almost never clear.

There are some rare instances of borrowing so striking that scholars universally agree on an Egyptian or Babylonian text as a direct progenitor of a biblical text. The tenth-century BCE Egyptian Maxims of Amenomope, for example, clearly served as a model for Proverbs 22:17—24:22.⁶ Similarly, there may be a connection between the Babylonian Epic of Gilgemesh and the flood story in Genesis 6–8. In general, however, detection of clear borrowing of an earlier text by biblical writers is rare. The fact that human suffering and questions about meaning are ubiquitous in the ancient Near East complicate discussions about what earlier Near Eastern sources may have been used by the authors of Job as they constructed their book.

Book of Job and Wisdom Literature

It should be clear that the biblical book of Job fits this general description employed above. It is essentially a moral tale, coupled with extensive poetic dialogues. The story is set in a non-covenantal context. Neither Job nor his friends are identified as Hebrews. Nowhere is the book are the promises of Yahweh or the covenant with Abraham mentioned.

Job speaks honestly throughout the book; the speeches of the friends and God provide some practical advice; it begins with Job as an individual, one different from others because he is blameless and upright; and throughout the book, reason is employed by the hero to suggest that the traditional answers in ancient Israel to why people suffer are untenable in his case.

The book of Job, then, is clearly an example of ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature. Like Plato, who wrote in dialogue form and who often ended his dialogues inconclusively, the authors of Job involve the reader in an intense debate that ends, not with a resolution, but with a new set of questions. Questions about the nature of suffering and the meaning of life.

The questions raised in the book of Job go right to the heart of the faith of Israel. But the authors of Job were unwilling to soften the question of innocent suffering. Thus, they often put in the mouth of Job words which sounded like blasphemy to the ears of orthodox people. This unswerving honesty is a characteristic of both ancient Near Eastern wisdom in general and Hebrew wisdom in particular.

Hebrew Parallels to Job

Certainly the clearest parallels to the book of Job are to be found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Many of the Psalms contain complaints strikingly similar to those of Job. They frequently lament the suffering of the innocent or express perplexity at the prosperity of evil doers. Psalm 49, for example, presents the experience of a righteous individual who, though persecuted unjustly, nevertheless expresses confidence in God’s deliverance. Psalm 10 may serve as another illustrative example:

Why dost though stand far off, O Lord?Why dost thou hide thyself in times of trouble?In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor:let them be caught in the schemes which they have devised.For the wicked boasts the desires of his heart and the man greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord.In pride of his countenance the wicked does not seek him;All his thoughts are, There is no God.His ways prosper at all times;thy judgments are on high, out of his sight;as for all his foes, he puffs at them.He thinks in his heart, "I shall not be moved;throughout all generations I shall not meet adversity.⁷

Psalm 88 offers still another striking parallel:

O Lord, my God, I call for help by day;I cry out in the night before thee.Let my prayer come before thee,incline thy ear to my cry.For my soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to Sheol.I am reckoned among those who go down to the pit.I am a man who has no strength,Like on forsaken among the dead,like the slain who lie in the grave,like those who though remember no more,for they are cut off from my hand.thou hast put me in the depths of the pit,in the region of the dark and the deep.They wrath lies heavy upon me,and though dost overwhelm me with all thy waves.⁸

The problem of suffering plays a vital role in Psalms 12, 18, 22, 69, 112 and 118, as well. Similar consternation can be found in Isaiah 1:7-9; 5:5-19; 28:14-18; the end of chapter 30; and the opening of chapter 31, in addition to much of chapters 40 to 55. Ezekiel raises the problem of innocent suffering in 2:9-10; 7:1-4; 8:12; 9:9; 18:1-4, and a good portion of Jeremiah is devoted to the issue of theodicy. Similarities in form and content between Job and Jeremiah (such as Job 3:3-10 and Jeremiah 20:14-20) have been noted by a number of scholars,⁹ Proverbs one through nine also seem preoccupied with the prosperity of the wicked and the hardship of the innocent, as does Habakkuk, a book of disparate sources whose various parts are connected by the theme of theodicy. Indeed the writer of Ecclesiastes is of the same mind when it comes to the workings of retributive justice:

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look at the tears of the oppressed—with no one to comfort them. On the sides of the oppressors there was power—with no one to comfort them. And I thought of the dead, who already have died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.¹⁰

Throughout Ecclesiastes and the apocryphal books of Ben Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon, a central issue is the meaning of life in the face of terrible suffering and death.¹¹

A number of the nature psalms express a wonder at the natural world strikingly similar in content and literary power to Elihu’s speeches in chapters 33–37 and the theophany in chapters 38–41 of Job.¹² Psalm 18, for example, provides whirlwind theophany much like that of Job 38:

Then the earth reeled and rocked;the foundations of the mountains also trembled and quaked because he was angry.¹³

Sometimes even a specific phrase like Job’s curse of the day of his birth in chapter three finds an echo in Jeremiah 20:14-18. Other phrases in Lamentations, Proverbs, and Isaiah seem directly related to parallel texts in Job, as does the hymnic fragment found in chapter five of Amos.¹⁴ Indeed, Job 7:17-18