1 Job’s catalogue of calamities seems designed to put on display not only an extreme degree of suffering but also a convergence of suffering from every conceivable kind (physical, social, psychological, economic, religious) and from every imaginable cause (othering, violence, disease, natural disaster).

2 Given the covenantal framework outlined especially in Deuteronomy 28, Israelite readers would have been particularly attracted to a path of reasoning that explains human well-being and calamity as manifestations of divine blessing and curse for human innocence or guilt before God.

3 See Job 9:2.

4 A few biblical scholars have argued that the Elihu speeches belong to the original composition, the most plausible among them being Robert Gordis, The Book of Job (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978, 2011) 546–53. Less well-supported is N. H. Tur-Sinai’s view, according to which the Elihu material predates the preceding cycles of Job and his friends. See Tur-Sinai, The Book of Job (Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1967) xxxviii–xxxix. Rather, the consensus view is most likely correct, which is that the Elihu speeches represent a later interpolation from another poet, though I think for reasons less related to lexical issues than stylistic and rhetorical ones. See Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (New York: Norton, 2010) 133. Whatever the proper dating, however, functionally the Elihu material seems to play a summative rather than contrastive role—what Samuel Balentine aptly calls a kind of “first commentary” on the preceding dialogue. See Balentine, Job (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2006) 17.

5 All citations of Hebrew text are taken from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (ed. Karl Elliger and Wilhelm Rudolph; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1997). All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

6 Given the use of the definite article הַשָּׂטָ֖ן the term clearly names a functionary rather than the name of an individual, which has given rise to speculations about whether the divinely appointed antagonist should be understood to be angelic or human.

7 In “Reading Job as Kierkegaardian Text,” Biblical Interpretation 24 (2016) 127–52, Brennan Breed rightly draws attention to the Socratic tradition of dialogue which aims not merely at advancing an argument but rather the “maieutic” (= midwife) function of encouraging “the birth of the critical subject” (129). But unlike that tradition, the Joban dialogue does not primarily aim to “spark autonomous thinking” about innocent suffering (127), nor does it encourage the existential aim Kierkegaard centers, to “appropriate faith” (152). Instead, I argue, it serves to give birth in the reader to dispositions for coping with the tragic burdens born of a faith already appropriated.

8 Marvin Pope, The Anchor Bible: Job (Garden City, NY: 1965) hypothesizes that the author of the poetic dialogues was drawing from an ancient prose folktale that already included all the conventional trappings of a retribution theology, which were then retained in the final composition of the text (xxi–xxix).

9 The formula of a long and prosperous life echoes the language of divine favor commemorating Israelite patriarchs in Genesis.

10 For this reason, much of the commentary tradition has framed the main interpretive problem about the compositional unity of the text in terms of this narrative versus dialogues contrast. See, Carol Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 3–11, and more recently Warren Zev Harvey, “Questions on the Book of Job,” Religious Studies 58.2 (June 2022) 1–10. Becoming overly fixated on the contrast in genres, however, can be misleading in seeking to locate the unifying features of the final form of the composition as a whole.

11 As Newsom puts it, “In many previous approaches to reading the book, the only voices taken seriously were those of Job and God. The others were mere foils” (Book of Job, 261). On the other hand, taking seriously the multiple forms, sources, and perspectives layered into the final composition of the text has led some commentators such as Robin Lane Fox to suppose that “no direct literary approach is possible” and that the resultant final form of the canonical text “no longer makes sense” as a whole. See Jeffrey Boss, Human Consciousnes of God in the Book of Job (New York: T&T Clark: 2010) 4. Pope, while affirming the narrative and dialogues to be basically at odds, nevertheless regards the book as aimed at establishing God’s sovereign prerogative in human affairs and God’s immunity from being “forced to bear witness against himself” (Pope, Job, lxvi–lxxv).

12 See Newsom, Book of Job, 21–31. While finding Bakthin’s notion of polyphonic analysis helpful in identifying the dialogue between multiple voices in the text, Newsom also holds that Bakhtinian dialogue is an insufficient framework for understanding Job, because of its inability to address “the very speech situation upon which the whole story is founded” (30–31), which “emerges from an irresistible curiosity to know something that utterly eludes dialogue” (31), an inability to deal with the violence of “coerced” speech throughout the dialogues, and an inability to make good sense of the “silences” that pervade the book (ibid.). As we shall see, however, I think these alleged inadequacies speak less to the interpretive possibilities afforded by a dialogic analysis of the text and more to the way we characterize the nature of that dialogue and the social logics it represents. It is rather Newsom’s focus on the social logics of genre that cannot adequately accommodate the tensions and aporia of coercion and silence, whereas these become salient when we shift our focus to the social logics projected by its characters.

13 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1921) 262–63.

14 Ibid., 280.

15 Ibid., 169.

16 Newsom, Book of Job, 168. I think Newsom finds these dynamics of discourse to fall outside a sole focus on dialogue because she conflates Bakhtinian dialogue as a genre of literature with a dialogic genre as a literary device within various genres of literature. For Bakhtin the narrator of didactic prose can be among the dialogical voices in a polyphonic work of literature, and this makes phenomena of silencing and coercion possible features of the narrator’s intersection with the characters of the speeches.

17 A reading most powerfully advanced by Gustavo Gutíerrez, On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (trans. Matthew J. O’Connell; New York: Orbis Books, 1987).

18 Readings of Job’s wife have tended to be assimilated to patriarchal norms that vilify women as temptations away from faithfulness to God. Balentine (Job, 62–65) highlights how this leads us to neglect ambiguities in our translation of this passage (which can also be read as declaring rather than questioning Job’s integrity and as calling him to bless rather than curse God). Still, Job’s reaction to her speech as that of a “foolish person” (הַנְּבָלֹות֙) complicates these alternative readings. See also C. L. Seow, “Job’s Wife,” in Engaging the Bible in a Gendered World (ed. Linda Day and Carolyn Pressler; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006) 141–52.

19 Gutíerrez, On Job, xviii.

20 The description calls to mind that class of human suffering described by Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (trans. Richard Philcox; New York: Grove Press, 1963). While the violence of colonialist oppression is not at the forefront of the rhetoric in the book of Job, neither is it entirely absent. It is significant that the canonical book of Job functions to expose Israelites under different historical periods of political domination and subjugation, and forces them to consider the innocent suffering of a non-Israelite and to attend to his humanity. Even so, for Job human wretchedness comes in many forms beyond political oppression.

21 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 3–23. Scarry offers an enormously insightful analysis of the way that our experiential and linguistic relationship to the world as an ordered cosmos is connected to our embodiment and the ways that social and political mediations of the inexpressibility of bodily pain disrupt that sense of order.

22 The language of primordial darkness and light, and juxtaposition of the watery womb with the primeval waters of chaos and their associations with Yamm and Leviathan depict Job’s desired journey backward from the order of creation through the chaos of decreation to a prior state of nonbeing. See Brian Doak, “Monster Violence in the Book of Job,” Journal of Religion and Violence 3 (2015) 269–87.

23 See Scarry, Body in Pain, 27–59.

24 Philosophers of religion routinely distinguish between (a) logical, (b) probabilistic or evidential, and (c) psychological or pastoral problems of evil, on which analysis the book of Job might be considered to speak most clearly to the third sort. But the distinction is dubious. For an excellent critique of the usual divisions and argument for the interconnectedness of the moral, practical, psychological, evidential, and metaphysical dimensions of the problem of suffering, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) 181–202.

25 For a discussion of Job as a classical source of skeptical theism, see Tamar Rudavsky, “A Brief History of Skeptical Responses to Evil,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil (ed. Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder; New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) 379–95, 381–86.

26 As Mark S. M. Scott puts it in “Befriending Job: Theodicy Amidst the Ashes,” Open Theology 6.1 (June, 2020) 319–26, at 325: “no theodicy, however compelling, can heal the deepest wounds of life.”

27 See especially Job 21:7–21; 29:11–17.

28 See Job 3:10–11; 10:18–19.

29 This construction הֹואִ֣ילוּ פְנוּ־בִ֑י (lit. “kindly look at me” or “be pleased to face me”) appears only here in the Hebrew Bible and seems to convey the request for an honest confrontation and assessment of his condition.

30 Job’s point is subtle in 9:19–24. His acknowledgment that God is unquestionably just is grounded in a recognition of the unknowability and thus the unaccountability of divine justice which makes it a non-consoling reality. Excesses of evil and divine justice alike lie outside the domain of our comprehension. See Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998). Still, it is not right to say as Newsom does that “[f]or Job the excess of evil is God” (Book of Job, 129).

31 The image highlights the posture that Job maintains toward his friends throughout, which is to see them not as philosophical opponents with bad arguments but as incompetent physicians (רֹפְאֵ֖י אֱלִ֣ל [lit. “worthless healers”]) applying a toxic salve to a friend’s mortal wound. The issue is accordingly the therapeutic uses of theology that Nemo refers to as “techniques”—approaches to the human condition that presume a prior lawfulness susceptible to our strategic interventions (Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 176).

32 An essentially victim-blaming dynamic.

33 I disagree with Balentine, who follows Clines in suggesting that Job’s plea for “pity” or “compassion” (חָנֻּ֬נִי) is sarcastic: having lamented his abandonment by loved ones in 19:19 (“those I love have turned against me”), he remains grasping for consolation.

34 Likewise, in 19:28–29 Job points out that even while his friends are pursuing him to find the “root of the trouble” as if it lay in him, they ought to fear for themselves, since they are no less susceptible to the violence of divine judgments than he is.

35 Williams’s homily entitled “Dark Night,” in A Ray of Darkness (Cowley: Cambridge, MA: 1995), describes the “delusional” character of theological meaning-making “designed to comfort and justify us in the style of religious life we have found congenial” (80). Our suffering can illuminate a darkness, revealing that “our path goes round a hole, a bottomless black pit. In the middle of all our religious constructs—if we have the honesty to look at it—is an emptiness. It makes nonsense of all religion, conservative or radical, and all piety,” and this, he supposes, is “the darkness of God” about which John of the Cross spoke (81).

36 As Norman Habel puts it in The Book of Job (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1985): “They have abandoned their role as friends and become experts in argument rather than compassionate friends who stand beside Job in spite of God’s attacks” (150). What commentators frequently miss, however, is just what his friends are getting in return for their barter.

37 For a more general account of “toxic” speech see Lynne Tirrell, “Toxic Speech: Toward an Epistemology of Discursive Harm,” Philosophical Topics 45.2 (2017) 139–61.

38 For an overview of terror management theory in social psychology (developed from the cultural anthropology of Ernest Becker) see Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015).

39 The term “spiritual bypassing” to describe this dynamic was first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984. See his Toward a Psychology of Awakening (Boston: Shambala, 2000), and, more recently, Robert Masters, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010).

40 It is not clear whether שְׂעָרָ֥ה (“storm” or “tempest) in 9:17 ought to be translated as a foreshadowing of the סְּעָרָה out of which God confronts Job in 38:1, because the difference in spelling suggests that the two words are homonyms. For that reason, Greenstein and Alter both render שְׂעָרָ֥ה in 9:17 “for a hair he crushes me.” See Edward Greenstein, Job: A New Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) 40 n. 12, and Alter, Wisdom Books, 44. It’s also possible, I think, that the use of the homonym is a double-entendre aimed at foreshadowing the divine whirlwind. Even so, a similar parallel occurs in Job 30:22: “You lift me up to the wind and cause me to ride [on it].”

41 I follow Greenstein (Job, 185) in translating ‘אֶמְאַ֣ס (lit. “I reject”) as an intransitive rather than supplying a direct object as many other translations attempt to do (thus “I despise [myself]” in the NIV). As Jan Fokklemann explains in The Book of Job in Form (Leiden: Brill, 2012): “what exactly does Job reject as a speaker? The context itself suggests an answer: Job’s approach so far, his behaviour in protesting and demanding a lawsuit. Job is throwing the towel in. . . Essentially, verse 6a says nothing else than 40:4b. . . ‘I lay my hand on my mouth.’. . . I have rendered v. 6a as “therefore I quit’” (318). The other major lexical problem is with the translation of נִחַ֑מְתִּי as “I repent” or “I am sorry” when it might equally well be translated “I am comforted” with respect to עָפָ֥ר וָאֵֽפֶר (“dust and ashes”), which we find in Gutíerrez (On Job, 86–87). While the theme of consolation makes this translation tempting it also fails to make sense given the context of God’s rebuke and parallelism with Job’s response in 40:4 (which aligns with his prior anticipations of how he would have to respond should God appear—by relenting his claims). Rather than a moral repentance, this seems to elaborate on the sense in which he has “given up”: he acknowledges that he has been forced to drop his case against the cruelties of divine providence. Or, it might be, as Greenstein has it, that Job “takes pity on dust and ashes” as an oblique reference to humanity qua creatures of dust in their frailty and finitude (cf. ‘עָפָר֙ in Gen. 2:7) (Job, xx, 185). Newsom rightly observes that this marks a kind of “counterpoint” to Job’s reaction of “radical acceptance that refuses to admit a tragic rupture” in 3:10 (Newsom, Book of Job, 258) as seen from the perspective of the narrator. In the dialogues, Job’s refusals of radical acceptance served to heighten his need for consolation, while here it serves to show us that God’s appearance has left that need entirely unsatisfied.

42 In “Healing and Silence in the Epilogue of Job,” Word and World 30.1 (2010) 16–22, Jeremy Schipper argues that Job does not necessarily undergo a physical healing in the epilogue’s resolution, despite this being often assumed by interpreters who reason that restoration requires the “repair” of disability.

43 They וַיָּנֻ֤דוּ (empathized, or as Greenstein (Job, 187) has it, “shook-their-heads-in-pity” with him), and they וַיְנַחֲמ֣וּ (consoled, comforted) him. Note the contrast with Job’s worthless healers, who came to him in 2:11 likewise “to empathize and console him” (using these same verb roots, and thus forming a kind of thematic inclusio for the entire composition).

44 Balentine remarks that “it is hard to overlook the connection elsewhere in the Old Testament between double compensation and (at least) a tacit admission of guilt” and points us to Francis Anderson’s exegesis that connects this passage to that statute in Exod 22:4 requiring that anyone who wrongfully holds the possession of another must pay back double. So Anderson, in Job: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), writes: “it is a wry touch that the Lord, like any thief who has been found out (Exod 22:4), repays Job double what he took from him” (317).

45 For a suggestion about how to read this language in scripture in connection with the problem of divine hiddenness, see Sameer Yadav “The Hidden Love of God and the Imaging Defense,” in Love, Human and Divine: Contemporary Essays in Systematic and Philosophical Theology (ed. James M. Arcadi, Oliver D. Crisp and Jordan Wessling; New York: T&T Clark, 2020) 65–82.

46 See Joan Reid et al., “Contemporary Review of Empirical and Clinical Studies of Trauma Bonding in Violent or Exploitative Relationships,” International Journal of Psychological Research 8.1 (2013) 37–73.

47 One dimension of this anthropomorphism is the depiction of God’s inability to bridge the cognitive gap as tragic not only for Job but also for God. Given Job’s losses, the gesture of double repayment is an impotent gesture that renders God pitiable to us in God’s necessarily misunderstood sovereignty. Just how to theorize the form of divine accommodation that grounds our dependence on anthropomorphism is a complicated question. See William P. Alston, “Two Cheers for Mystery!,” in God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion (ed. Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 99–114. See also Michael Rea, The Hiddenness of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) 42–62, 137–60; Sameer Yadav, The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015) 393–456.

48 See Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 29–52. Curiously while this chapter is titled “Posing the Problems: Beginning with Job,” we are not treated to any more than a brief mention of Job or its titular character before moving on to discuss the more general problem of unmerited suffering. Nevertheless, my reading fits well with Adams’s approach to that problem.

49 Eleonore Stump’s recent attempt to revive the felix culpa tradition, in The Image of God: The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Mourning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), moves in just the direction that I take a Joban theology to reject. Samuel Lebens and Tyron Goldschmidt take the radical approach of arguing that God literally erases past suffering. See their “The Promise of a New Past,” Philosophers’ Imprint 17 (2017) 1–25. Even if metaphysically possible, attempting to appropriate such a view as a source of consolation in our present sufferings arguably brings insuperable problems of its own.

50 We might examine readings of Job that demand his physical restoration via the framework of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), which critiques uses of narrative to compensate for a lack perceived as a flaw in the natural order. Thanks to Julia Watts Besler for pointing me to this intersection with the disability literature.

51 For a theological exception to this see the first volume of David Kelsey’s work of theological anthropology in his Eccentric Existence (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster-John Knox, 2009), which identifies the inter-canonical discourses of wisdom in terms of an irreducible dialectical relationship with redemption narrative discourses.

52 See Susan Garrett, “The Patience of Job and Patience of Jesus,” Interpretation 53.3 (1999) 254–64.

53 Neiman, Evil, 5, 315 ff.

54 Ibid., 321.

55 Ibid., 26.

56 Ibid., 94.

57 Ibid., 197, 239.

58 Van der Lugt, Dark Matters, 401.

59 Ibid., 402.

60 Ibid., 403.

61 Though not the intent of philosophical optimism, which often aims at a kind of solidarity, van der Lugt notes that it also tends to be bound to a vision of “self-mastery” that encourages failures of compassion (ibid., 403).

62 Ibid., 405 (emphasis in original).

63 Ibid., 406.

64 Ibid., 409 (emphasis in original).

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 406 (emphasis in original).

67 This is, of course, the central insight of liberation theology’s insistence on theology done in real rather than imagined proximity to actual human suffering.

68 We should distinguish this chastening of narrative and theological meaning-making from a wholesale rejection of it. For an account of theology precisely as grounded in narrative construction, see Sameer Yadav, “Doctrine as Ontological Commitment to a Narrative,” in The Tasks of Dogmatics (ed. Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017) 70–86.

69 Van der Lugt, Dark Matters,406 (italics in original).

70 Ibid., 411.

71 See ibid., 413, and especially van der Lugt’s citation of Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, 152–53 to explicate the idea of a “pessimistic hope.”

72 See Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (trans. James Wagner; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2020).

73 Steven Vicciho, The Book of Job: A History of Interpretation and a Commentary (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020) xiv.

74 For an exposition of these themes in the trial narratives of Jesus in the Gospels, see Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

75 See Stephen Barton, Discipleship and Family Ties in Mark and Matthew (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

76 See John 19:25–27.

77 See Adams’s reflections on the biblical testimony of Christ’s dereliction (Christ and Horrors, 53–79).