Northrop Frye and Michael Dolzani 

Copyright © 1982, 2013, Victoria University

TEACHER'S GUIDE Lecture 20 &

Lecture 21, Part 1

JOB: A TEST

Synopsis

The fact that the Book of Job opens with Satan present in the court of God illustrates a very significant fact: that only in the Book of Job are Satan and the powers of darkness and chaos treated as creatures of God rather than as his enemies. Satan in that court is acting as the Accuser in a lawsuit, and Job expresses his faith that he will have an advocate or 'Redeemer'. Job's three friends are also thinking in terms of law and accusation, which is why they are certain that Job is being punished for some infraction of the Deuteronomic Code. But Job's case goes beyond the legal perspectives of law and even wisdom, for the reason that nothing he could possibly have done could warrant such extreme punishment. Job is rather being tested by God. To turn God's actions into a puzzle, however, turns Job's suffering into an intellectual problem of theodicy. There can never be a satisfying answer to a problem so stated: its only value is to force us to question the assumptions behind the question itself, so that by reformulating them, we might escape from the world or the mental level which they consolidate.

Program Lecture Outline: Key Facts

1. The tremendous act of poetic originality that opens the Book of Job with Satan in the court of God provides one key to the book's meaning. Only in the Book of Job are the darkness and chaos with which Creation began in Genesis treated as creatures of God tolerated within his Creation, rather than as excluded adversaries.
2. As representative of those forces within God's court, Satan acts as the prosecutor or Accuser of mankind, carrying on the legal metaphor or 'judgment' that runs all the way through the Bible.
3. Job expresses faith (19:25) that he will find an advocate or 'Redeemer', though the charges against him remain a terrifying mystery.
4. Job's three friends are 'miserable comforters' for all their real devotion because, in being unwilling to believe in any situation not covered by their interpretation of the Mosaic Code, they insist that Job must necessarily have done something wrong; and in doing so, they carry on Satan's business of accusation.
5. But what has happened to Job does not bear any sane relation to anything he could conceivably have done. Therefore, the legal perspective of law and wisdom, insofar at least as it is limited to ideas of reward and punishment, must be expanded in Job's case to include prophecy's vision of an entire fallen world of reality.
6. Job is not being punished: he is being tested by God. God's reasons for this are bound up with the whole intellectual problem of theodicy, the question of the origin of good and evil. But there can be no satisfactory answer to a question framed in these terms.
7. We are forced to return to the original mystery and reformulate the assumptions behind it. The Book of Job refuses to give an 'answer' to the situation it portrays, in order to force us to reinterpret and transform the way in which we have defined, and thereby in a sense created, that situation for ourselves.

Biblical Passages Cited

• Job 19:25.—'For I know that my redeemer liveth'.
• Job 16:2.—'Miserable comforters are ye all'.
• Job 2:11-13.—Job's friends: 'So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights'.

The Teacher's Perspective

The three lectures on the Book of Job, of which this is the first, are in many ways the climax to this entire series, and recreate its content in microcosm. This is in part because the Book of Job does something similar to the entire Bible: as The Great Code says on page 193, it is 'the epitome of the narrative of the Bible, as the Book of Revelation is the epitome of its imagery'. But it is also because, like their subject, the Job lectures seem to have an impact that is particularly dramatic, even more so than the version of them that appears in The Great Code itself. For that reason, it is very satisfying to be able to preserve them in something like their original form, though the teacher should notice that, even now, material remains in the transcripts that might very well be made use of.

There is another reason for this expanded treatment, however. For the purposes of this series, Job has absorbed the perspective of prophecy in such concentrated form that no separate discussion of prophecy remains in the video lectures. The advantage of this lies in the capacity of the Book of Job to isolate the salient characteristic of prophecy as a phase of revelation: the vision of reality as a fallen world, a world of radical alienation and discontinuity that becomes the dialectical opposite of the reality of custom, tradition and continuous institutions embodied in law and wisdom. These two perspectives keep recreating each other throughout the entire Biblical tradition. Though the Book of Job is sometimes classed with the wisdom books, it might be more illuminating to think of the Old Testament as divided between legal and historical material on the one hand and the more purely imaginative material of poetry and wisdom on the other, with prophecy's application of the imagination to history forming a link between them, and with Job itself as a kind of key to prophecy. The work's concerns are in themselves non-historical: Job is from Edom, not Israel, and he uses the general terms El, Elohim and Shaddai ('the Almighty') for his God. But it is in Job that we find the vision that the prophets apply to history, the vision of reality as a dark, fallen world of violence and terror. If we are not to view the prophets simply as political malcontents screaming their lungs out whenever the established authority refused to follow their recommendations, we must give them credit for some such larger vision. They are not merely wasting something like one quarter of the length of the Bible with paranoiacally-repetitive threatening and cursing: they are trying to tell us that we are living in hell.

Examining the poetic aspect of the prophetic material might enable the class to make this distinction more clearly. The teacher may ask the students to discuss how the political propaganda aspect of the prophets' message is in tension with the visionary and imaginative thrust of its highly figurative language: why should the latter remain so prominent, as well as so haunting to posterity, if the prophets were only looking for a violent chastisement of their enemies or even of their own people? Comparison with examples of real political propaganda might help to make this difference clear.

Nowhere is the pre-eminence of figurative language in prophecy more apparent than in Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55). The class may find the comparison with Job to be very striking, not only in the imagery of the 'suffering servant' and the idea that redemption might come out of victimage and endurance, but in the repeated use of the same term go'el, 'redeemer'. Scholars find it striking too: some of them even hypothesize a direct influence, given the probable closeness of the two texts in date of composition (somewhere in the area of the 6th-4th centuries B.C.).

But Job has other, more general resemblances to prophecy. We may remember that Elijah, the archetypal prophet, is also spoken to by God in connection with a violent wind (I Kings 19:11-12). A windstorm is a common Biblical accompaniment to a theophany, and some scholars think that this goes back to the alleged origins of Yahweh as a desert storm god (or maybe storm demon). But what is more important is that Elijah, in making his way back to Mt. Horeb, is repeating the original covenant-making ceremony of Moses with God; and that Job, in his own encounter with God, is also both repeating and transcending the conditions of that original contract, and thereby expanding the legal perspective that had come down from it. If this seems at first only a farfetched analogy, it would be well to remember how intensely Job recapitulates the vision of the entire Bible, including the Exodus-dominated perspective of so much of the Old Testament. As The Great Code puts it: 'But Job seems to have gone the entire circuit of the Bible's narrative, from creation and fall through the plagues of Egypt, the sayings of the fathers transmitting law and wisdom, the flash of prophetic insight that breaks the chain of wisdom, and on to the final vision of presence and the knowledge that in the midst of death we are in life' (197).

It is interesting to examine how the question of good and evil and the problem of suffering inevitably frame themselves in a legal perspective, so that metaphors of trial and imprisonment are hovering in the background. In Christian legalism, the rationalization for the existence of evil and suffering is the doctrine of original sin, which goes back to the sense of a contract or covenant with God that was broken by Adam. Though Christ is supposed to have redeemed us from Adam's sin, and left us baptism as the perpetual renewal of his redemptive act through history, most versions of Christianity have prudently postponed the final efficacy of his redemption until the end of time. Even Milton, pressured to explain why, if Christ has already redeemed us, tyranny and corruption are still flourishing, ends by putting some self-defensive speeches in God's mouth in Paradise Lost , Book III.

The political version of the legal argument is traditionally the idea of the social contract, put forth in positive terms by Edmund Burke and in negative ones by Rousseau. It is usually dependent at some point on its religious counterpart, since it bases its claim for the necessity of law and authority on the assertion that the heart of man is fundamentally corrupt. If we are tempted to dismiss these as a blatant rationalization for tyranny, however, we may remember Prof. Frye's remark that what the high priest Caiaphas said in the Gospel of John (11:50) has been echoed at some point by every human being whatsoever: that it is expedient that one man die for the people. The teacher may have the class read some version of the quintessential statement of this problem of 'the greatest good for the greatest number', a parable whose power to haunt the imagination has caused it to be repeated by a number of writers, including Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (the chapter called 'Snow') and Ursula LeGuin in 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas'. The dilemma is this: if the whole world's suffering were to be ended, and the only price exacted were that one innocent child were to be tortured forever in a back room of Utopia, would you consent to it? Can one avoid being involved in guilt by either choice, in fact, since to say no is to condemn untold numbers of other people to suffering and death?

The point of this story is that it is essentially a retelling of the legal aspect of the Book of Job. One condition of the bargain is that the child is never even to be told why he is being tormented, so that from his point of view, his sufferings will seem as mysterious as Job's do to him. The students will probably be familiar with the story of the young Charles Dickens in the debtors' prison and the blacking factory, recounted in fictional terms in David Copperfield, and be able to realize how Dickens in a very real way personally re-enacted that parable, with shattering effect on his personality. The image of the tormented child or childlike person shows up relentlessly in his fiction: from Mr. Pickwick to Amy Dorrit, who is swallowed up by the Marshalsea, the prison where Dickens went with his family. In Little Dorrit, the prison not only becomes the same kind of symbol as Leviathan in the Book of Job, but in a passage where shafts of sunlight become bars of the prison of 'this lower world', the whole world is suddenly revealed as being caught in that prison, engulfed by that Leviathan. It is the saintlike Little Dorrit herself who becomes the go'el, the redeemer, for the hero Arthur Clennam. Biblical images in this novel are nearly obsessive: Clennam's Calvinistic and self-righteous mother has a picture of the plagues of Egypt on her wall, just to make sure that we get the message.

The point is that no real God could be the kind of judge implied by a child-tormenting parable: the legal perspective, in its simplistic formulation at least, has to be transcended, which is one reason why the bet with Satan drops out of the Book of Job itself. The question has to be reformulated. The whole business of asking better questions is really another aspect of the idea of phases of revelation, the sense of an increasingly-expanding comprehension. The teacher may have the class look at Shaw's The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, mentioned by Prof. Frye in the transcripts, which reads like a humorous version of Blake's Seven Eyes of God. On a more serious level, there is Jung's Answer to Job, with its idea of a blind, unconscious deity who has to develop into consciousness and discrimination, of which more later in these programs. There is also a profoundly relevant passage in Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, volume 4, Creative Mythology, called 'The Symbol Without Meaning'. Finally, on a more abstract and philosophical level, the French philosopher of language Jacques Derrida has founded his influential philosophy of deconstructionism on the postulate that symbols, including words in a language, do not point to meanings, but only to other symbols, since any 'meaning' we give for a verbal symbol has to be articulated with other verbal symbols. Thus, there is never any meaning or 'signified': there is only an endless chain of symbols or 'signifiers'; which is to say that there are no answers, only different questions. But in Derrida, we are stuck with the 'letter', the signifier; the spirit, the meaning or signified, turns out to be an illusion, and we are left with the ironic images of an imprisoning 'chain of signifiers' and a riddling labyrinth of language, Leviathan with his mouth sealed shut.

Supplementary Reading

1. Biblical Passages

• Isaiah 53.—The suffering servant.
• I Kings 19:11-12.—Elijah at Mt. Horeb.
• John 11:50.—'It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people'.

2. Corresponding Passages in The Great Code

• Chapter Five. Typology II.
  • pp. 125-29. Prophecy.
• Chapter Seven. Myth II.
  • pp. 193-98. The Book of Job.

Suggested Essay or Discussion Questions

1. Prof. Frye refers to theodicy as 'that dreary chess game'. Given the meaning of the film, how does this evoke that actual chess game that the Knight plays against Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal? Are there ways in which this film resembles the Book of Job? What Biblical echoes are found in it?
2. Provide some examples to illustrate Prof. Frye's remark that Kafka's works can be considered an extended commentary on the Book of Job.
3. Discuss Yeats' poem 'At Algeciras: A Meditation Upon Death' in light of our discussion of the Book of Job.

Lecture 21, Part 2

JOB AND THE QUESTION OF TRAGEDY

Synopsis

Though the Book of Job is usually classed as one of the world's great tragedies, Job's restoration to prosperity at the end makes it structurally a comedy. As such, it follows the comic pattern of a sudden and improbable reversal of the action at a crucial point; so that the inevitable and ironic ending of tragedy is averted in favor of the kind of happy ending that is true of comedy but not true of normal human life. And so, if we had seen Job in his restoration to prosperity, we might not have seen sheep and she-asses and beautiful daughters: we might have seen only a beggar on a dunghill. But that beggar would have seen something that we have not seen, of which his restored prosperity is really only the symbol, something bound up with his statement that he has seen God. Despite the comic ending, however, Job's deprivations raise an issue often raised in tragedy: how much can a man lose of what he has before it begins to affect his sense of what he is? And the Book of Job also resembles tragedy in that no moralistic explanations will work to explain its catastrophe.

Program Lecture Outline: Key Facts

1. Tragedy points to the inevitable and credible, and is therefore always associated with irony. By contrast, 'all's well that ends well' is more descriptive of the structure of comedy, which wrenches the action by a violent twist toward an ending that is not only improbable but impossible. That is, in the case of Job, three new daughters could not realistically wipe out Job's experience of losing his original daughters.
2. One of Job's daughters has a name that means a box of eyeshadow. In other words, Job's restored prosperity involves his having moved to another level of existence, and on the normal level of credibility, we might not be able to see his restoration at all.
3. During their confrontation, something has apparently passed between Job and God, for which everything that happens afterward is only the symbol, including Job's tremendous statement that he has actually seen God, as well as the restoration of his goods, his family and his community.
4. Questions raised by tragedy remain relevant to Job, however, despite the containing comic structure. One tragic characteristic he possesses is Aristotle's hamartia, which does not imply a moralistic explanation for tragedy, but simply the sense of being in an exposed position, most often because of the possession of exceptional qualities.
5. Satan is in fact testing the nature of those qualities to see how far they are inherent in Job and how far they are dependent upon his property. Thus, the Book of Job resembles certain other tragedies because it raises the question: how much can a man lose of what he has before it begins to affect his sense of what he is?

Biblical Passages Cited

• Job 42:14. Jemima, Kezia and Keren-happuch: Job's three new daughters.
• Job 42:5. 'I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee'.

The Teacher's Perspective

This program examines some aspects of the literary form of the Book of Job. It is highly significant that a book which we have described as a key to the entire Biblical narrative should have a character so entirely imaginative and so little historical. Though we have described its wrestlings with the law in terms of the Deuteronomic Code, it remains true that the terms in which it does so are universalized, even when considered in relation to other obviously-fictitious Biblical narratives like Tobit, the latter forming an interesting comparison to Job in its similar relation to wisdom and its very different treatment of unjustified suffering. It is clear that the book's nonhistorical setting is at least partly what enables it to be so daring in its questioning, without quite so great a worry of unintentionally becoming a kind of lightning rod for historical, moral and theological anxieties.

At any rate, despite Job's character as an imaginative narrative, historical scholarship has done with it what such scholarship's analytic nature is designed to do with a text, i.e., broken it down into a number of component parts. The poem on wisdom in chapter 28 and the Elihu speeches may be later insertions; there may be reorderings and curtailments in the third cycle of speeches, and so on. There is no question of the value and accuracy of historical scholarship; there is only the caution that we can never interpret the text without at least tentatively assuming its unity in the state that we now have it; and this would remain true even if the prose folktale and the poetic dialogues were found to have two different authors. To criticize the poem as 'really' an altered tragedy, in other words, is to revise it to suit our purposes. Actually, in the state we have it, it more resembles what in Shakespearean criticism has been called a 'problem comedy'. The teacher may even want to have students compare it to a play which it shows some striking analogies to, Measure for Measure, drawing attention in particular to such thematic words as 'justice' and 'mercy', and to the resemblance of its rather inscrutable Duke to Job's God. The Merchant of Venice, with its ritual ordeal and its plot device of the cruel irrational law, is another possibility; and one notices in both plays how the final happy ending is in powerful and deliberate tension with certain more ironic elements, very much as it is in the Book of Job.

The conditional independence of literary criticism from historical considerations may extend even to translation. Prof. Frye has noted the occasional tendency to shrink Behemoth and Leviathan to hippopotamus and crocodile (if not to combine them into one animal); something similar has happened in the Anchor Bible to the unicorn in chapter 39, which it turns out is likely historically to have been only a buffalo (The RSV has 'wild ox'). The class may discuss whether this is not another case of an inspired mistranslation, not because a unicorn is more glamorous than a buffalo, but because it may be closer to what God is actually saying to Job. Prof. Frye has said that Job is in some ways a poetic and prophetic Genesis, and it seems that all through God's speech to Job in chapters 38-41, he is trying to tell Job that once one reaches a perspective outside the imprisoning body of Leviathan (see The Great Code, 195-96), the Creation may look like something quite different than it does to Job, to whom it means boils and violent storms. There, the size and power of these animals becomes an aspect of their beauty. Similarly, in going through God's speech, the class may notice that it is a vision of nature in terms of magnificence and sublimity, where the typical animals are horse, hawk, eagle, and so on. The fact that the unicorn, like the dragon on which Behemoth and Leviathan are variations, does not exist in nature as we know it suggests that in God's eyes nature is present in its original unfallen form, in which the gates of death open at will (38:17) and the morning stars sing together. Second Isaiah, who is close to Job in so many ways (compare, for example, God's speech with Isaiah 40:12) insists that God is a Redeemer precisely because he is the Creator: when he tells the earth to shout and the mountains to break forth into singing (44:23), he seems to be referring to the same kind of vision of an unfallen nature completely alive and bursting with energy that we get in Job and in some of the Psalms.

It may be too, then, that it is in God's own vision that Job is present in the form of his restored prosperity. Job's statement that he has seen God would mean in that case that he has for a timeless moment looked through God's eyes, and seen as God sees. Shakespeare's King Lear also suffers the progressive loss of everything he has, and his tragedy is also associated with three daughters. In the final moments of the play, he makes some mysterious-sounding remarks that suggest that in his dying moments he is looking on another kind of world, one in which he also sees his beloved daughter alive and restored to him again. The Canadian poet Jay Macpherson has a poem called 'The Beauty of Job's Daughters' (see Job 42:15) that is nearly as beautiful as the daughters themselves; and there is also T.S. Eliot's haunting 'Marina', a vision of restoration and the recovery of a daughter as expressed in terms of Shakespeare's Pericles. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is another work that suggests that redemption may be in the eye of the perceiver, as the evidence by which Alyosha concludes that God must exist is the same evidence by which Ivan concludes that he cannot possibly exist. The shaking of Alyosha's faith by the sudden decay of Father Zossima's dead body indeed evokes the central paradox of faith in Job, the one Handel set to music in The Messiah : 'And though… worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God' (19:26). There is also of course the temptation theme running through the Grand Inquisitor episode.

This latter may call to mind the situation of Milton's Paradise Regained. In The Reason of Church Government, Milton distinguishes two kinds of epic poems, the full or 'diffuse' epic in twelve books (or a multiple of twelve), and the brief epic, of which his model is the Book of Job. Since Milton's own contribution to the latter form is Paradise Regained, the teacher may ask students whether they can see any resemblances of Milton's poem to Job. First of all, there is the similarity of dramatic situation: both Christ and Job undergo a trial, a test. In each case, this has two aspects, a physical trial by ordeal and a mental contest or verbal agon. Second, there is the curious link between Job's restoration and Milton's title, Paradise Regained. We are not used to thinking of the Temptation as the act that regains paradise; but the explanation of this oddity is that Milton is thinking typologically. Of the three contests between Christ and Satan after the latter's initial defeat at Christ's hands and his fall from heaven, it is the one embodied in the Temptation scene that directly repeats the temptation of Adam by the serpent. It is this triumph as the Second Adam in the very beginning of his ministry that is, from one point of view, the crucial point of Christ's career: it is what ensures beforehand that his crucifixion and death are not another fall like Adam's, but a victory and a consummation. Or, to put it briefly, the Temptation is the antitype of the fall of Adam; and Paradise Regained could be considered a kind of poetic antitype of Paradise Lost , a concentrated recreation of its vision (including the vision of redemption at the end), this time in terms of realization and fulfillment. The connection with Job is this: when Jesus returns at the end of Milton's poem to the obscurity of his mother's house, it may not look to the world as if paradise has been regained at all. The whole quest of Christ into hell, the death and resurrection in the form of a dragonslaying is yet to come, and so is the final battle with 'that old dragon' at the apocalypse. But to Milton, the real battle with Satan was not a physical contest but a crisis of vision; and there is a sense in which Job too triumphs in the end over his adversary in the form of Leviathan, even if he may not be able to land him in a physical contest. For comparison and contrast, see Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Melville's Moby Dick (whose last chapter begins with a quotation from Job), and Roger Zelazny's science fiction story 'The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth', whose title comes from the Book of Job. We may sum up the argument at this point by saying that Paradise Regained and Job are alike, not because of a series of accidental resemblances but because they are both recreations of the same total structure of Biblical narrative. The same is true of Blake's example of the brief epic, Milton, which is exactly half as long as his diffuse epic, Jerusalem, and has Milton himself as the hero in quest of a clarified vision, in contest with the powers of darkness.

Supplementary Reading

1. Biblical Passages

• Job 39:9.—'Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?'
• Isaiah 40:12.—'Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span…?'
• Isaiah 44:23.—'shout, ye lower parts of the earth: break forth into singing, ye mountains'.

Job 19:26.—'And though…worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God'.

2. Corresponding Passages in The Great Code

• Chapter Seven. Myth II.
  • pp.193-98. The Book of Job.

3. Other

• Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Book of Job, Paul S. Sanders, editor, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Suggested Essay or Discussion Questions

1. Compare Archibald MacLeish's J.B., mentioned by Prof. Frye in the transcripts, to the Book of Job in both form and theme.
2. Goethe's Faust is often said to be modeled on the Book of Job. What resemblances can be pointed out? (Students may notice the explicit parallel of the Prologue in Heaven, with Satan in the court of God; also the association with wisdom in Faust's opening speech; the temptation by Mephistopheles; the splitting of the poem into Part I and Part II, which are tragic and comic-apocalyptic respectively, the latter ending in the redemption of Faust by a threefold feminine principle, one of whom is the beloved lost by Faust in Part I).
3. Compare Plato's Apology and Crito to the Book of Job: what similarities and differences are evident? (Students may observe the relation to the problem of wisdom, the element of verbal contest or debate and the quasi-dramatic dialogue form, the three accusers—associated by Blake with Job's three 'comforters'—and the rejection by society of the potentially prophetic figure).