Job 1-2–
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
[Illustration of Job by William Blake]
Both Job and the Bhagavadgita place themselves in an international context. The Bhagavadgita concerns a battle fought for the whole world. The character Job is not Jewish but among the “sons of the east” (b’nay qedem, 1.3)—a representative of Oriental wisdom, particularly after his supernatural lessons. Both works also contain teaching by a preceptor—a basic format of wisdom literature.
But what in each narrative does that teaching accomplish? It solves some immediate problem (e.g., Arjuna’s indecision or Job’s suffering) and hints at more. Arjuna hears that if he understood properly, he would be one with Brahman: that Being underlying divine language Nicolás 66). Nonetheless, what might be called the first commentary on the Bhagavadgita, the Anugita, a section of the Mahabharata, roughly dated to the third century C.E. at “the latest” (Telang 207) shows Arjuna still needing more instruction. Given Judaic theology, one might think that there is never any question of Job’s rising to divine status, yet the situation is not quite that simple: “While inviting Job to imitate him, Yahweh threatens him with the effects of overweening arrogance.
The terms of the power Yahweh enjoins upon Job (Job 40.11–13) emphasize a double bind in this challenge to be godlike…” (Good 357) The experiences of listening to such wisdom texts as Job and the Bhagavadgitainvolve empathizing with a learner making progress but never rising quite to equality with the supreme teacher. In other words, the scripture remains scripture. It cannot be tossed away, its lesson learned, for it is never fully learned. Wisdom remains mysterious. The Bhagavadgita says of its revelation, “…This secret [rahasya.m ] is supreme indeed” (4.3; Sargeant). The Anugita describes the Bhagavadgita (14.16; Roy 35). The difficulty or impossibility of finding wisdom forms the subject of Job’s famous ode to it (28). Zophar promises “secrets of wisdom” (11.6). Teasingly, his subsequent remark is so cryptic it is hard even to translate. The readers’ desire will not be satisfied quickly, but both works contain an epiphany to promise accessibility to the divine.
The Book of Job presents a long preparation for this advent. The
first Comforter (Eliphaz) admits that when revelation came to him “secretly,” he
only received a whisper (4.12). Thereafter, voices grow more detailed and insistent
as the dialogue moves toward a crescendo, with God Himself as Preceptor. Although
He prefers Job to the Comforters, an early reader need not have construed this as
a rejection of everything they say. In first century (or early second century) C.E.,
a few verses after mentioning Job, the Book of James remarks:
And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and
if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. (5.15)
James acknowledges the possibility of Job’s being innocent by writing “if” (admitting
that not all such sickness as Job suffers always comes from sin). Mostly, however,
James seems on the side of the first three Comforters, whose pedestrian viewpoint
he echoes, for the lower levels of wisdom establish the average person’s response
to common situations.
In an oral culture, information tends to be either common knowledge
of the whole tribe (the situation James is trying to reestablish for the Christian
community) or arcana whispered within a subgroup. In modern times, print renders
major secrets difficult to conceal from any literate person. But manuscript culture
tends to lie between the two, with consequent tensions between public and private.
Even aside from oral commentary that might accompany it, reading manuscripts aloud
was like being a preceptor of mysteries, except partly depersonalized and decontextualized.
The same instruction constituted each reading, even though the listeners were constantly
learning. If attentive, they found in the same words ever deeper versions of some
truth that remained forever elusive—changing.
Devotional Secrets
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To most Vishnuites, and indeed to most Hindus, the Bhagavadgita is what the New Testament is to good Christians. It is their chief devotional book. In it many millions of Indians have for centuries found their principal source of religious inspiration (Edgerton 105) |
Both evoke a remote wisdom. So vague as to seem allegorical, Job seems set (but not written) in patriarchal times. The place is Uz, which may be near Aram (cf. Gen. 10.23) or Edom (cf. Lam. 4.21) or simply some fabulous Orient, where the title character is “greatest of all the men in the east” (1.3). Even the language is “exotic … (loaded with Aramaisms and Arabisms).” (Moshe Greenberg in Alter and Kermode 283). One of the Comforters has an Israelite name (Elihu); the others do not.
Also set long before its probable date of composition, the Bhagavadgitaconcerns a legendary conflict, its first chapter cataloguing splendidly caparisoned warriors from many realms who converge north of Delhi on an allegorical “field of virtue” Sargeant 39). In the Bhagavadgita’s context within the Mahabharata, the hero Janamejaya holds court at Taxila, where he hears the story. The poem, thus, does not conceive of itself as narrative interesting only to people living near Delhi (merely one of its widely scattered settings). Given the ancient difficulties of travel, to come from diverse places is always to be a stranger. Both works, therefore, are wisdom from the unknown, pliable to reinterpretation. Not surprisingly, then, they underwent changes of meaning. What is notable is how similar these changes were to one another. They exemplify characteristic patterns in the drift of reader response from wisdom as Truth to wisdom as feeling—the affects literature most easily delivers.
Christianity came to see Job less in terms of philosophy than emotion, the love of Jesus, interpreted as the Redeemer for whom Job calls. Particularly since Handel placed "I know that my Redeemer liveth" (Job 19.25) in his Messiah, the Christian identification of that savior with Jesus has become precisely the kind of popular notion secular scholars most loudly denounce as anachronistic (Good 259-60).
Comparably, the bhakti (devotion to Krishna) in the Bhagavadgita became in later tradition a passionate, even erotic mysticism. A main point of Friedhelm Hardy’s 692 page tome Viraha–Bhakti is to demonstrate that, in the Bhagavadgita, bhakti meant intellectual concentration and did not gain highly emotional overtones until the Bhagavata–Purana, composed sometime between the ninth and eleventh centuries C.E. (HARDY 488). Nonetheless, the common fate of reader response to both works—a growing emotionalism—may signal incipient traces of it in the originals. After all, if the works had not stirred their original audience, they would not have survived.
Despite denouncing popular anachronisms, modern literary treatment tends to focus on the psychology of the principal characters (Job’s personal plight, Arjuna’s concern about fighting). This comes from transferring to early sacred works conventions of later secular ones (e.g., treating a protagonist as a realistic character). Instead, Job and Arjuna are shadowy. The former is introduced with the universalizing phrase “A man there was” (ish haya) and continues as the representative of a suffering humanity questioning God. An equally sketchy figure, Arjuna is everyman receiving revelation in a dialogue the static nature of which is rendered particularly striking by the contrast between it and its setting, a battle field.
Unlike a play emphasizing human personalities, scriptures are more likely to stress superhuman powers. Read in a modern, secular way, the Book of Job tells of a man who demands justice, becoming more and more sarcastic and impatient until God finally appears and makes him repent. Such a secularist reading searches for occasional blasphemies, e.g., Job’s describing himself as “godless” (Job 27.8) and the deity as “wicked” (ra sa’, 27.7) (Good 354). Despite Job’s lapses from piety, however, the Epistle of James, with no probable irony, writes of the patience of Job as proverbial (5.11). Ezekiel 14.14 gives Job as an exemplar of righteousness. The Testament of Job (ca. first century C.E.) similarly idealizes its protagonist (Glatzer 13). “The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians” (ca. first century C.E.) portrays Job as a pious prophet “heralding the coming of Christ” (I Clement XVII; Lake I:39). Unless there was some other Job known to devout tradition (Good 189-90), it paid little attention to the aesthetic details of dramatic characterization, preferring to elucidate more holy issues such as the identity of “the Redeemer.”
As to the Bhagavadgita, aware of Western approaches Arvind Sharma makes a distinction between its “theoretical and practical teaching”: “So far as its practical teaching is concerned, the G–i t–a is univocal: Arjuna must fight. But so far as its theoretical or spiritual teaching is concerned it is multivalent (xxvii).”
Western academic commentaries emphasize the “practical teaching,” the response to Arjuna’s dramatic situation. The Anugita, however, ignores it. The next major commentary, ´S a.n kara’s (ca. eighth century C.E.), omits treating verses that establish the dramatic situation and sees the Bhagavadgitaas embodying his own passive mysticism. In the twentieth century, the dominant Indian interpretation holds the work to be an allegory preaching Gandhian pacifism, thereby not merely obliterating but reversing the “practical teaching”! Like the “chaos” of an inkblot, a scripture is a mirror of the audience’s mind.
And there is no reason to presume that earlier audiences were closer
to modern academia. Each devotional commentary seems distant from a literary reading
of the Bhagavadgita. Even before the Anug–it–a (ca. third century C.E.)
, we can perhaps glimpse a very early attitude through a pillar erected by the
Taxilan Greek, Heliodorus (ca. 115 B.C.E). And it lacks reference to the “practical
sense.” Amidst a decorative pattern of Hellenistic honeysuckle, it dedicates itself
to the Indian deity
“V[–a ]sudeva, [Vishnu] the God of Gods,” also called by Heliodorus “Krishna.”
Describing himself as a “Bhagavata” (someone belonging to a Bhagav–a n, a
“personal, absolute God”), Heliodorus concludes his inscription: “Three important
precepts when practiced lead to heaven—self-restraint, charity and conscientiousness.”
(Hardy 21; Woodcock 118). As one of the earliest reference to a Vi.s navism like
that in the Bhagavadgita, the inscription provides important evidence to the
extent something so brief can.
Despite the difference in format between the pillar, the Bhagavadgita,
the
Anugita , and Job, all have enough in common to reveal certain conventions
of religious interpretation. Tending toward broad knowledge, for example, the literate
presumed that many gods were worshipped throughout the world and must be taken into
consideration, e.g., as subordinates of One (who brought the kind of reason and order
that writing had). The inscription to “God of gods,” a title that appears also in
Bhagavadgita 10.15, implies that other deities are the subjects, creations,
or manifestations (vibhuti) of Krishna (Vishnu, Vasudeva) (Smet 25).
According to the very influential, eighth–century commentary of
´Shankara (at least as it is usually interpreted), this meant that there was
only one God, indeed, only one fully real being in the entire universe (Hardy 21).
Nonetheless, monism is probably a development subsequent to the Bhagavadgita,
which refers to a variety of gods and sees temporal value in sacrifice to them.
Similarly, although later interpreted as monotheistic, Job is more complex than that.
YHWH presides like a king over a court of his “sons.” Job 41.17 has YHWH mention
deities: “Gods [elohim] are frightened at his rising,/at his crashing down,
they shrink away” Good 169). Job expostulates that he has not made the “Baals [of
the land] gasp,” thereby evidencing his concern for the local gods. Job 5.7 alludes
to the sons of Reshef, the Syrian deity of fire and plague, and 3.8 to Yamm, a sea
god (Good 60 and 54). Like Krishna, who claims to be source of “the wisdom of the
wise”
(Bhagavadgita10.38), Job 38.36 (in the Standford University Press translation)
has YHWH ask, “Who put wisdom into Thoth …? (Good 158). With this allusion, the Book
of Job places itself in competition with Egyptian occult works ascribed to Thôth,
god of wisdom (or, by extrapolation, with other sapiental texts such as the Bhagavadgita).
A major function of a chief god to lesser beings was as preceptor (analogous to the relationship of reader instructing listeners). For the pillar inscription, Vasudeva is the one revealing the lesson as in the Bhagavadgita. This activity is most explicit in the Anugita, where Krishna teaches Arjuna by relating various dialogues between masters and students. He explains the last of these as an allegory of Himself as “preceptor … [and] … the mind … [as his] pupil.”(14.52; Roy 101). Job’s comforters have arrived to be his teachers, but he accepts God alone in that role, which YHWH finally fulfills.
What is taught? For Heliodorus’s inscription, it is “self-restraint, charity and conscientiousness.” The Anugita, summarizes the Bhagavadgita’s ethical teachings with a more elaborate version of these “three acts” (Roy 86). Job consists largely of argument over whether Job has fulfilled a long list of moral injunctions. Unsurprisingly, both long and short religious writings often concern ethics, the short ones alluding to a system of behavior, the longer ones presumably doing more than this.
That more includes the act of prolonged reading. The texts concern analogs of this concentrated attention. In both Bhagavadgitaand Anugita, Krishna insists that Arjuna listen with one–pointed concentration and teaches various forms of Yogic meditation, e.g.:
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There, having directed his mind to a single object, (6.12). |
Interestingly, Kurt Vonnegut reports in one of his autobiographical essays that Transcendental Meditation provided him precisely the same experience as reading.
As prologue to the arguments in Job, the protagonist and the Comforters
engage in a kind of silent meditation: “they sat … upon the ground seven days and
seven nights, and none spake a word unto him….” (2.13). Closer to the experience
of extended reading aloud, the speakers repeatedly ask for each other’s attention.
Given the difficulty of the metaphysics, the need is great. Listeners are to seek
not only what can be expressed but what cannot. According to Job (though he has much
to say), contrasted with the weight of his afflictions his “words are swallowed up”
(6.3). To Zophar, God is beyond measure (11.7–9) as, to Job, is Wisdom (28.16-19).
So listeners must imagine through the words what is not said. They are forerunners
of a long line of rabbis who made study of and conjecture about lacunae in the texts
into a paradigm of the religious life.
Monuments vs. Scrolls
While noting the corroboration provided by Heliodorus’s inscription, we should pause
to remark the obvious difference between its clarity and scriptural “chaos.” Heliodorus’s
inscription belongs to the same genre as pillars the Buddhist emperor A´s oka
used to preach his faith to most of India (third century B.C.E.). Unlike these relatively
brief inscriptions (which both teach ethics as a way to heaven), neither the large
Buddhist nor Vai.s navite texts (e.g., the Bhagavadgita) recommend heaven
as an ultimate goal. A´soka’s and Heliodorus’s presenting their faiths in very
similar manners may be significant, especially considering A´s oka’s close
connection with a whole Buddhist establishment, which would have had ample opportunities
to correct him if it saw the need. Possibly, for both Buddhism and Vai.s navism,
the way to heaven was the exoteric teaching—anything more than that being an esoteric
one. In 78 C.E., reference both to “Nirvana” and to “Boddhisattva,” the latter perhaps
used in an early Mahayanist sense, occurs in the “Silver Scroll” Inscription, found
buried within a silver vase in a chapel and thus not intended for public consumption.
Another funerary inscription from the same shrine also contains the word “Nirvana”
(76 C.E.). Dar 222–223.
A´s oka’s or Heliodorus’s inscriptions are like “dharma saves”
bumper stickers. They take advantage of writing’s potential to transmit a slogan
to hundreds of people. The heaven they promise is quickly understood. More abstruse
states beyond it do not fit as well in slogans. A´s oka’s pillars have sometimes
been called “Buddhism of the laity,” but they and Heliodorus’s inscription could
equally well be deemed the religion of epigraphs—simple and upbeat, in contrast to
scriptures’ long, brooding “chaos.”
Mazes of Dejection
Like theBhagavadgit–a (or any number of other oriental tales) , the
Book of Job has a frame story. In it, Job enjoys a number of worldly blessings: seven
sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep and three–thousand camels, five–hundred
yoke of oxen and five hundred she–asses. To clear his sons of possible sins, Job
sacrifices “according to their number,” sepher, the word also for book,
because reckoning and writing used the same symbols, equally ways of reducing life
to abstraction. Thus, the possessions can all be replaced, even the children, whom
he treats “according to number” rather than personality or name. Job has a storybook
life, ideal both in the sense of its goodness and also in its numerology (all the
pairs of terms equaling the so–called “perfect” figure ten). As if an anthropologist
had tape-recorded it from a pre-literate society, this frame story is usually called
a “folk tale.” Nonetheless, it comes in writing with a protagonist who acts according
to the sepher. His being tam, blameless, shows the present state of
his accounts. He has attained to a consciousness like that of the lower level of
literacy, those merely taught to be bookkeepers and scribes, not savants.
Equally methodical, his children do not party randomly but follow a “cycle of feast
days” (hiqq–i p–u ). Edwin Good guesses that these are birthday parties (48).
The children celebrate the number of their years. Even more appropriate is the very
idea of cycle or circle, untroubled repetition. In this opening, all that can be
tallied appears faultless, but Job knows he must also worry about the hidden, his
children’s hearts.
The scene then shifts to what is totally invisible to humanity,
the divine court, where YHWH meets His “sons.” Not just a number, one of them has
the descriptive title hasatan, the Accuser. Unlike the impersonality with
which the mortal family are presented, we hear them talk to one another—an unsettling
exchange with power to shatter Job’s cycle. The Accuser places a curse on himself,
thereby magically overpowering the deity, but at the risk of some unstated penalty:
[Edwin Good argues] that the curse is a way of forcing the god to respond, requiring
his attention, because the curse cannot go unattended. It will work ineluctably through
to its end result, and the god himself is under its sway (Good 314).
Where Job is an accountant, the Accuser is a gambler. His going back and forth on
the earth sounds aimless, random. In the same court is order and disorder, tallying
versus the magic of the word, which takes on a life of its own.
As many have noted, the wager is that Job will barak (bless or curse) God. On the loss of his possessions, Job does barak God, albeit piously. Has the Accuser won?
What renders the question unanswerable is the way we overhear this supernatural wager. Oral communication has its normal function within a group who know the local conventions (e.g., what constitutes winning). Here, however, we are interlopers. Scripture often brings us divine words from some inhuman context, so that the situations are intrinsically mysterious.
Certainly, the Bhagavadgita also comes via the superordinary. Among its many tellers is Sa.m jaya, who narrates by means of a clairvoyant vision. No reference to a prophetic narrator occurs in the Book of Job, yet it is implicit in there being heavenly scenes. Thus, ancient readers assumed that Moses, Job, or some other prophet wrote (i.e., reported) the action. A further implication is that YHWH cared enough about humanity to provide the vision. This implication is consoling and reassuring. It teaches the lesson (consonant with the very nature of education) that persistence may bring communication with Ultimate Reality. Looked at this way, a providential air even attaches to the miraculous survival of one slave each time to tell of invasion or fire from heaven.
A second lesson is multivalence. Job acts scrupulously according to the rules he knows, but suffers because of unknown ones. In this regard, the obscurity of the heavenly scenes is valuable. If the text offered a single clear truth beyond Job’s accounting, then the readership would hold as inflexibly to that as Job to his limited understanding. More useful in a changing world, the work simply shows that one must look beyond the known—always. Job’s catastrophes provide no principle that can be extrapolated to readers’ lives except the uncertainty of existence, where God must be acting according to some other level of existence than the L4 rules Job follows perfectly. By providing an array of sometimes contradictory ways to salvation, the Bhagavadgitaalso shows Reality to be radically multivalent.
A third lesson is the magic power of words. Although the exact effect of curse or blessing remains in doubt, no character questions its having some efficacy. Furthermore, Job wants those (presumably witches) who are skilled in rousing Leviathan, to curse his own birthday (3.8), thereby to destroy the last, mocking vestige of the old, temporal organization in his present catastrophe—but order and disorder are always together.
In a chapter in The Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, Agnes Kunz
calls attention to the paradox that the opening chapter in the Bhagavadgitais
entitled “The Yoga of Dejection of Arjuna” while dejection is usually thought of
as the opposite of a yoga (way of union with Brahman). But Krishna welcomes his devotees
to the “chaos” before Light;“Do not be afraid,” says the dark Lord—to take your rest
in my darkness! “I AM delivering you from the evil!” (XVIII. 66). (Kunz 138).
The beginning of Job also is an approach to the Divine by way of the darkness of
despair, which unlike the Bhagavadgita, does not end quickly, but deepens
because of three spirals of dialogue that struggle toward the education of Job and
the “Comforters.”
Continue to Job 3-14
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