Job 3-14–
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
The Freshman Spiral (3-14)
Eliphaz, the first of those who try to educate Job, attributes to him two syntactically
ambiguous pairs of items: fear (of God) and kiclah (confidence or folly).
According to Eliphaz’s paradox, Job’s fear (of God) has been his faith or confidence.
Throughout the book (indeed, throughout the Hebrew scriptures), fearing God is synonymous
with religion. So awesome is YHWH’s manifestation from the whirlwind that Job abhors
himself and repents when he has done nothing wrong. Faced with K.r.s.n a manifest
in glory, Arjuna responds:
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My limbs sink down (Bhagavadgita 1.29) |
Learning requires an attention that in this period was equated
with reverence.
Eliphaz is most susceptible to fear. Even a nightmare of the Divine leaves him with
his hairs on end (4.15). He understands that before the transcendent purity of God,
no one is righteous. He offers Job a choice between the impatience of the fool (Job’s
present course according to Eliphaz) and the wisdom of one who patiently presents
his case to God.
Actually an epitome of the latter, Job is steeped in language.
It has become for him so rich that he can taste it; having suffered evil, he knows
its flavor: “Is there iniquity in my tongue? cannot my taste discern perverse things?”
(6.30). The same idea is in Indian tradition as in the B.r had——a ra.n yaka
Upani.s ad 2.3, which identifies speech as an organ of perception (Radhakrishnan
215). One possible implication of this shared epistemology is an attitude that one
learns by talking, so that his experience runs parallel to those who learn by listening
to the reading.
To Job’s claims for personal experience, Bildad counters that since individual memory
is short, they should turn to the wisdom of the fathers. According to it, man is
like papyrus (gome), God like the water sustaining it (Job 8.11-12). (Cf.
“And I cause all the plants to thrive” Bhagavadg—i t—a 15.13.). Before the
Joban papyrus can become paper and receive words (thereby transcending the transience
of individual life), it may wither away if denied nurture. God has not actively attacked
Job, merely withdrawn support. In one way the image is apt, for Job has just complained
of his words being swallowed by divine wrath. He is a book manqué. Unjustly,
however, Bildad judges Job’s protestations of innocence to be empty as wind, undeserving
publication.
His days moving quickly as papyrus boats as he heads for seemingly inevitable destruction (9.26), Job no longer trusts in the power of language to defend him, because he can never match the eloquence of the Most High. God speaks and the sun darkens; as if they were epistles, He places a seal (chatham) on the stars (8.7). The world is God’s communication, as responsive to his will as speech, as permanent as writing. But all this creation communicates to Job is the echo of his own misery. In the Masoretic text, Job complains that there is not (and in the Syriac he longs that there were) an arbitrator–a form of the verb yakach (argue or correct)–to mediate between God and man.
A Christian interpretation is to see this as a desire for Jesus
(in a work that may not even have been Jewish in origin, let alone Christian). Despite
the obvious anachronism of such an approach, it is understandable to the extent that
Job is calling for a Logos—like personification of communication to bring man and
God together. It anticipates Job’s later desire for some document to serve as communiqué
and ultimately the function of the Book of Job itself as introducing the reader to
the divine hierophany. Comparable to this foreshadowing of a Logos, K.r.s.n a describes
himself as being the copulative of compound words, dvandva (Bhagavadg—it—a
10.34), the prime linguistic connection. He adds that he is the sacred text (9.16).
In Job, Zophar argues that God’s wisdom is unfathomable. The KJV renders Job 11.6—7:
| And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom,
that they are double to that which is! Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less
than thine iniquity deserveth. Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? |
Derisively, Job speaks of the Comforters wisdom like Krishna sarcastically deriding Arjuna’s “wisdom words [prajñavadan] (Bhagavadgita 2.2). Then Job counters, that since true wisdom exceeds human knowledge, the Comforters cannot possess it. He lists the madness and folly that God brings to the most wise, for “With him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are his” (12.16). In the appearances He brings, life becomes a trick, analogous to the maya of the Bhagavadgita. That manifestation sprang from the energy with which the gods create, while YHWH also is creator, constantly controlling His creation, so that it becomes dreamlike and unpredictable:
He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.…They [the wise and powerful] grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man. (12.22, 25).
Stephen Mitchell finds a similar ambiance in the conclusion:
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Job’s comfort at the end is in his mortality. The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, that whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath—thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance (Mitchel xxviii). |
Neither YHWH’s creation normaya is mere illusion (as Westerners often presume of the latter) yet, in the Book of Job at least, the created world is as contingent on God’s will as maya is on the Divine.
Job continues the first exchange by threatening that the Comforters piety, being a lie, will displease God, who will punish them (13.10—11). Their words are “dust” and “clay” (13.12). In contrast to the transience of the verbal, here linked to the Comforters, the Divine is at this point associated with the written, though its timeless patterns are cruelly imposed on the living. God has recorded “bitter things” (merorah) against Job, like the bitter writing a woman accused of adultery must drink (Numbers 5.24). He undergoes an ordeal, accused of long—past faults. Job adds that God engraves the soles of his feet, perhaps in the sense of setting a limitation, but with a Kafkaesque image of imprinting on the body (or analogous to the assumption of most alternative healing traditions that symptoms are representational of psychological or spiritual processes). Certainly, Job is complaining about this painful reflexology, but the implications of being restrained for trial and suffering an ordeal offer the possibility of vindication. Job ends the first exchange wishing (but doubting) that his imprisonment might have an end and God call him from the Pit.
Continue to Job15-
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