UNGODLY ABUSE:
JOB, HIS WIFE, AND THEIR GOD
Presented at the Pacific Northwest Meeting of
the American Academy of Religion
Walla Walla College, May, 1992
Being faithful is the equivalent of being
conquered and raped by divine power.
Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Christianity, Patriarchy,
and Abuse
Divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and
the child who suffers
without even raising a voice’ is lauded as the hope of the world.
Joanne C. Browne & Rebecca Parker Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse
Were it not written in [Job] it would be
impossible to say:
God is like a man whom someone tries to incite and who is in the end incited.
The Talmud
He blusters and bullies Job, never effectively
answering Job’s questions.
Such a God, Job seems to say, deserves to be blasphemed.
David Penchansky, The Betrayal of God
It is indeed no edifying spectacle to see how
quickly Yahweh abandons his faithful servant
to the evil spirit and lets him fall without compunction or pity into the abyss
of physical and moral suffering.
Carl Jung, Answer to Job
The character called ‘the Lord’ can do anything
to him–have this daughter raped and mutilated,
send his sons to Auschwitz–and he will turn the other cheek. This is not a
matter of
spiritual acquiescence, but of mere capitulation to an unjust, superior force.
Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job
There are many forms of addiction: some people are hooked on drugs,
others cannot get enough sex, and many are addicted to power. Power addicts are
found in our families, our societies, and in our religions. I find it ironic
that my students are eager to criticize Zeus and other pagan gods for their
indignities and injustices, but fail to notice that Yahweh abuses his power as
well. They reject pagan religion as immoral, but they do not apply the same
critical reasoning to the stories of the Bible. If the story of Job were a Greek
myth with Zeus playing the part of Yahweh, I am sure that my students would
roundly condemn the actions of the Greek high god.
Anna Case-Winters observes that in Judaism "power becomes a paraphrase of
the divine names, a kind of euphemism for God."(1)
In western religions, more so than in the East, divine power has been conceived
in terms of absolute political power. In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity God is
seen as a cosmic king, exerting sovereign and uncontested rule over the universe
and everything in it. The author(s) of the Book of Job use the word "almighty" (‘el
shaddai) more than any other Hebrew author. Political terms such as
pantokrator ("all-ruling"), sovereignty, and kingship dominate western
descriptions of God. In his book Kingship of God
Martin Buber argues that Yahweh is different from the other middle eastern
gods in that he demands control in all areas of human life, not just the
religious.
Yahweh is a jealous God and he will tolerate no contenders for the rule
of the universe. It is especially clear that Yahweh will not tolerate the
existence of female deities. Many passages in the Hebrew scriptures imply a
constant battle between Yahweh and the forces of watery chaos, most frequently
portrayed in ancient religions as feminine in nature. Those irrational
goddesses, however, will not bother us in the "new heaven and new earth," for it
in "the sea [is] no more" (Rev. 21:1). It is significant that Job, who believes
that God has unjustly made him an enemy, likens himself to a sea monster (7:11).
In Genesis 1:1 Yahweh’s original antagonist is "the deep (tehom)," a
demythologized form and linguistic equivalent of Tiamat, a Babylonian
she-dragon.
Yahweh’s addiction to raw power is so blind that his prophets sometimes
have to rebuke and restrain him. Moses indicts Yahweh for doing evil to his
people (Ex. 5:22). In Numbers 14:12 Yahweh throws a fit and decides to destroy
the people of Israel, but Moses reminds him that he is supposed to be a just God
and that he should reconsider. In Genesis 18 Abraham reminds Yahweh that he must
always do the right and beseeches him to spare the innocent in Sodom and
Gomorrah. Abraham, as we all know, only manages to save Lot and his family.
Moses, Joshua, and Saul thought they had acting judiciously in their military
campaigns, but Yahweh’s messengers remind them that his policy was to "utterly
destroy all that breathed" (Num. 31; 1 Sam. 15; Jos. 10:40).
DIVINE MISBEHAVIOR: EAST AND WEST
In ranking the divine attributes, the early church fathers placed divine
omnipotence first, even before God’s goodness or his omniscience. What we see in
much western theology is an undisguised worship of raw, unadulterated power.
This addiction to power has driven the patriarchal social and political systems
that we still contend with today. Feminists are obviously correct that the
social evils of general physical abuse and specific sexual abuse, including
rape, are largely the result of this distortion of male power. Many western
males have become addicted to power in the same way that Yahweh was.
In the Asian religions it is rare to find God
or the sacred described as raw power. In Indra and Varuna we can find Vedic
equivalents of Yahweh, but these gods were replaced by more benevolent ones. It
is true that some Buddhists worship their savior as a cosmic king, but most of
them firmly reject such an idolatry of power. The Asian
religions generally celebrate an internal spiritual power that is persuasive not
coercive and aggressive in nature. There is one
instructive exception in the portrayal of Krishna in the Mahabharata, and
one story in particular offers some fascinating parallels to Job and his wife.
In the Mahabharata Krishna is not, contrary to
his popular reputation, a god of peace and compassion, but a deity who calls for
war and leads his own clan and his relatives into total destruction. Arjuna, as
is well known from the Bhagavad-gita, is not inclined to fight, but
Krishna inists that he do his duty as a warrior. Later in the ensuing battle,
Krishna tells Arjuna to break the rules of warfare and strike an enemy solider
whose chariot is stuck in the mud.
Another aspect of Krishna’s plan is that Yudhishthira, the eldest and
most pacifist of the Pandava brothers, should lose a game of dice, which leads
to the humiliation of his wife Draupadi and the exile of his brothers. Job’s
wife demands that he curse God, but Draupadi does the deed herself:
"As a man splits log with log, stone with stone, iron with iron–things
that [of themselves] can neither move nor think–so does the Lord God, the
Self-subsistent, the primal Grandshire, hurt one creature by means of another,
establishing for himself an alibi. Joining things together only to disjoin them
again the Lord acts at his own good pleasure, playing with his creatures as
children play with dolls. He does not treat his creatures as a father or a
mother would but acts in raging anger; and since he acts so, others follow his
example."(2)
Here is an indictment of God as severe as Job’s, coming from the
mouth of a woman. There is also certain truth in Draupadi’s point that humans
will model their behavior on the actions of their gods. Yudhishthira is shocked
at his wife’s blasphemy and defends Krishna in ways very similar to Job’s
friends. Finally, Gandhari, wife of the Kuru king Dhritarashtra, also curses
Krishna for the destruction that he has wrought, and predicts that his tribe
will also be destroyed and that he will fall, like Achilles, to an arrow to the
ankle.(3)
In Chinese religion one development during the Zhou
dynasty is especially relevant to our topic. Tian
became the Zhou kings’ personal God and he vouched for
the their virtue and guaranteed justice in the land. But when the
Zhou dynasty began to fall apart in the 9th Century
BCE, the people did not blame themselves or their kings, but accused Tian
instead. The poets of the period were particularly harsh. Here is one who might
be called the Chinese Job:
Oh, universal Tian,whom we call
parent!
I am innocent and blameless,
Yet I suffer from such great disorders.
Majestic Heaven, you are too stern;
for truly I am innocent.
Majestic Heaven, you are too cruel;
for truly I am blameless?(4)
As a result of complaints such as these, the
Zou people deposed their god, and Tian
did not have a revival until the time of Confucius.
There is only one instance of the dismissal of
deities in the Hebrew scriptures. This amazing event is found in Psalms 82. The
scene is in heaven and Yahweh has called a meeting of his divine council–an
"executive board" composed of subordinate deities. Presumably there is only one
item on the day’s agenda: reports that Yahweh’s subordinates have been doing a
very poor job of ruling their respective nations. Yahweh gives these unnamed
gods no chance to defend themselves, and his judgment is swift and sure: "You
are gods, sons of the most High, all of you. Nevertheless, you shall [now] die
like men, and fall like any prince" (vv. 6-7). This heavenly drama may symbolize
one of the most crucial events in Hebrew theological history. It represents the
movement away from earlier forms of polytheism, or henotheism as this scene
represents, to the full fledged monotheism of later Judaism.
The story of Psalms 82 raises an obvious question: If the gods of the
nations can be removed from office, why cannot the high God himself be charged
with high crimes and misdemeanors? We ought to follow the lead of the courageous
Draupadi and indict those gods who plays with their creatures arbitrarily and
remove, as the wise Chinese did, these incompetent and abusive deities from
office. Interestingly, we have Hindu and Chinese equivalents of Job’s indictment
of God; but instructively, they impeach their abusive deity, while Job finally
submits to his. How is it that the Chinese and Indians manage to eliminate their
dysfunctional deities, but we in the West persist in preserving ours?
SATAN AS A MASK OF GOD
A bill of impeachment for Yahweh would contain many particulars, but I
have chosen to focus on the Book of Job. According to the traditional
interpretation of the story, the immediate defense would be that it is Satan,
not Yahweh, who is the abusive one. George W. Rutler is representative of this
view: "By introducing Satan, Job’s author is able to make the Thomist case that
the evil accomplished by creatures is known by God and yet God is absolutely not
the cause of evil, neither directly or indirectly. God’s granting permission to
start the play is precisely that, permission, not cause."(5)
Rutler is obviously not reading the text very carefully. Job, his wife,
and his friends all impute his misfortunes to Yahweh alone; they do not
acknowledge the complicity or even existence of Satan. It is Job who says:
"Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive evil, too?" (2:10);
and in the end Job’s brothers and sisters "comforted him for all the evil that
the Lord had brought upon him" (42:11). Furthermore, in the Muslim version of
the story, God, not Satan, is testing Job, even though Satan approaches Job’s
wife to make a deal about Job’s recovery.(6)
(More on this later.)
Following Hebraic theology, orthodox
Christianity insists that all power resides in God and God alone, and the power
of any agent, including Satan, is merely an extension of God’s power.
(For more on divine power see
www.uidaho.edu/ngier/3dp.htm.)
In the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not a separate agent
but simply one of the "masks" of God, as Martin Luther phrased it. "Satan,"
then, is just a title, not the name of a distinct evil power. Luther is the only
major Christian theologian who supported this early Hebrew idea of Satan. Luther
saw clearly the logic of divine omnipotence: "Since God moves and does all, we
must take it that he moves and acts even in Satan and the godless."(7)
In the Book of Job Satan has become a separate agent, and he appears to
be one of the subordinate deities in Yahweh’s divine council. In Zechariah Satan
stands on the right hand of God as the "angel of the Lord" and his chief accuser
(3:1ff.). He is Yahweh’s prosecuting attorney, or when there has been no crime
committed, as in the case of Job, he is Yahweh’s agent provocateur. One scholar
suggests that the role of Satan is modelled on the Persian secret service.(8)
Even though the author separates God and Satan for dramatic effect,
theologically he tells us that they are essentially the same cosmic power. It is
Yahweh, not Satan, who "has torn me in his wrath, and hated me"; it is Yahweh,
not Satan, who is "my adversary" (16:9). "Adversary" is of course the phrase
used to identify Satan, so Luther was correct: Satan is just the dark and
wrathful side of God himself. This is clear in the story of Balaam and his ass:
"But God’s anger was kindled because [Balaam] went; and the angel of the Lord
took his stand in the way as his adversary" (Num. 22:22).
IRRELEVANCIES OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND
Poor Job perseveres through the lost of his children, his worldly goods,
his health, and the accusations of his friends. He demands that Yahweh give him
an explanation for his suffering, and Yahweh finally responds with his famous
speech out of the whirlwind. One scholar describes Yahweh’s answer as a
"magnificent irrelevance" and another says that it is "not [a] response to Job’s
cry for vindication or. . .an endorsement of Job’s innocence. . . but a series
of ironical questions that make Job’s questions irrelevant."(9)A
conservative evangelical writer is just as candid: "This explains the apparently
unsatisfactory climax in which God does not answer Job’s questions or charges,
but though he proclaims the greatness of his all-might, not his ethical rule,
Job is satisfied."(10) In
other words, Yahweh proves his omnipotence, but not his goodness.
These are correct and honest assessments of Yahweh’s nonanswer to Job.
Yahweh’s speech from the whirlwind is a display of raw cosmic power, peppered
with pointless questions to Job, such as "where were you when I laid the
foundations of the earth" (38:4)? Yahweh also awes Job with his wonderful and
odd creatures, but what, as Job’s wife passionately objects in the companion
piece, does that have to do with Job’s indictment? In short, Yahweh’s answer to
Job is evasive, defensive, and insultingly irrelevant. Edwin M. Cook states that
"Job always knew that the god was powerful. It is not clear that he has learned
anything new, except that the god can also be arrogantly sarcastic."(11)
The traditional defense of Yahweh’s answer out of the whirlwind is that
he is simply reaffirming his divine prerogatives. Job is a mere creature, and he
has no right to judge God, the creator and sovereign ruler of the universe. One
of God’s prerogatives presumably is the right to use his creatures in any way,
including testing their faith. Would those who accept this line of argument also
allow this type of behavior in their families and societies? We might have
condoned this centuries ago–most likely using Yahweh as a model–but not today.
Yahweh’s answer is too much like the patriarch’s: "I am your father; I brought
you into the world; and you will do as I say." Most of us have rejected this as
a distortion of parental power, so we must reject Job’s God for the same reason.
Let us now make up a contemporary example for comparison’s sake. In
frequent fits of rage a man beats his wife and children. After every incident,
the man apologizes profusely, repents of his deeds, and promises never to do it
again. As a token of his resolve, he buys his family lavish gifts. Every time
the family accepts his apologies and his promises, but he continues to repeat
his behavior. The man is obviously addicted to his abusive behavior and his
family is, as some people phrase it, codependent upon it.
There is one crucial and obvious difference between this scenario and the
story of Job. Yahweh does restore children and stock, but he does not apologize;
he does not repent; he does not give a justification for his behavior.
Does being God mean that you never have to say you
are sorry? This cannot be it, for Yahweh does regret that he created humans
(Gen. 6:6), he repents twice in his conversations with Amos (7:1-6), and he
repents of the evil that he had planned to inflict on Jerusalem (2 Sam. 24:16).
So why is the Lord so adamant with regard to Job’s situation?
On the face of the text, it appears that Yahweh has no reason to
persecute Job. Speaking to Satan, he admits that "you (Satan) moved me against
him, to destroy him without cause" (2:3). Please note who is doing the moving
against Job: it is not Satan; it is Yahweh himself. Yahweh does not say: "I
allowed you, Satan, on your own power, to move against Job"; instead he says:
"You persuaded me to move against Job."
In his article "In Defense of God the Sage," Norman
C. Habel proposes that the author of Job, a representative of the Wisdom
tradition, subtly displaces the interventionist warrior God of the Pentateuch
with "God the Sage."(12)
Agreeing with Edwin Cook’s appraisal that the author of Job has rejected divine
retribution and has separated moral quality and external circumstance,(13)
Habel says that a divine sage only rules by
general, not special, providence. On this basis Habel then defends Yahweh’s
whirlwind speeches as a revelation of a God who rules the natural universe and
does not intervene in the particulars of human affairs. Human beings like Job
can acquire wisdom, a faculty of discernment that critically observes, as
Qoheleth tells us, all things "under heaven" (Eccles. 1:14). Because of his
distress Job is tempted to indict God as ‘el gibbor, the interventionist
warrior god. The true God of Wisdom answers from the whirlwind and reminds Job
of the amoral cosmic ecology. In the end Job is not so much humbled as he is
reaffirmed in his wisdom theology. This interpretation is ingenious and possibly
correct, but it cannot reconcile the problem of Job’s God within normative
Christianity and common piety, both wedded to the idea of an interventionist God
of history.
JOB REBELLIOUS VS. JOB SUBMISSIVE
For decades scholars have noticed the marked differences between the
folktale "frame" and the poetic "center" of the book. Some have even argued that
these disparate parts must have been written by two different authors. In his
book The Betrayal of God: Ideological Conflict in Job,
David Penchansky argues that some brilliant poet deliberately subverted
the orthodox theology of the basic story.(14)
In the prologue Job displays a neurotic piety (e.g., he
sacrifices secretly for his sons) and complete submission to God’s will. But the
Job of the poetry maintains his integrity and challenges Yahweh. The pious Job
refuses to curse God, but the Promethean Job does everything short of a formal
curse.
Itemizing
the actions of the latter, one commentator states: "Within these. . . chapters
of Job’s speeches can be found examples of some of the most anti-Yahwist
sentiments of which we have any record in literature."(15)
Another scholar summarizes Job’s indictment of Yahweh as follows: God is a
capricious tyrant (9:18-19), a corrupt judge (9:20-29), a wild beast that has
torn his flesh (16:7-9), and a ruthless warrior (6:4,9; 16:12-14; 19:18-19).(16)
As Ernst Bloch once said: "It is Yahweh who is on the defensive, thrust back by
the most poserful attacks on his righteousness."(17)
Penchansky and others have shown that the orthodox view of Job’s
restoration is false. Job is rewarded not for his piety, as tradition would have
it, but for his integrity. Job maintains his integrity in the poetic center by
speaking honestly before God, even if it means accusing him of injustice. If Job
is restored because of his piety, then Yahweh’s condemnation of the friends at
the end makes no sense whatsoever. Bruce Vawter’s provocative conclusion must be
true: "Job is being praised for having berated the Lord, challenged him,
satirized him, dared him, spurned him."(18)
David Robertson is just as compelling: "God’s praise of Job amounts to a
terrible self-incrimination. . . God is the object of an ironic joke."(19)
Abusive persons have no respect for those, like Job’s friends, who
temporize and rationalize violent behavior, but it has utmost respect for those
who stand up to them. Christian Duquoc says that Yahweh "is more honored by the
impatience and revolt of Job than by the adulation of the ‘friends’ who
recognize the designs of providence where God himself says he sees no such
thing."(20) Stephen Mitchell
believes that Job is liberated by his blasphemy, and that his final words do not
mean pious submission; rather, they constitute a savvy surrender to a superior
force.(21)
GIVING JOB’S WIFE A VOICE
And what about Job’s wife? She is the first to stand up to Yahweh with
her famous "Curse God and die!" Is it possible that she provided the inspiration
for Job’s new found courage? Nothing prevents us from answering in the
affirmative. If a later poet changed the story for his purposes, we can surely
subvert the story once again for ours. The poet who did violence to the folktale
did so because his religious tradition was not working for him. The women who
today do violence to the traditional Christian story are doing it for exactly
the same reason.
The sexist author does not even give Job’s wife a name, although later
rabbis thought she was called Dinah. Muslim commentators thought that she was
either Rahmat, the daughter of Joseph’s son Ephraim, or Makhir, the daughter of
Manasses.(22) According to the
Koran, Job’s wife miraculously regains her youth and bears Job 28 sons. The
Masoretic text spares her this burden and has her giving birth to only ten more
children. Stephen Mitchell believes that there is a hint of a more egalitarian
world after the restoration. Although they are still valued for their beauty,
Job’s new daughters have names, but the sons do not; and they get a share of
Job’s inheritance.(23)
The Muslim account contains wife abuse as well. While Job is sitting on
his ash heap, defending himself against his friends, Rahmat is out trying to
make a living. (The Septuagint has her "drudg[ing] from place to place" and the
apocryphal Testament of Job has her offering her own hair, a Hebrew woman’s most
precious possession, for a loaf of bread.) The devil appears to her and says
that he will restore all that they had lost if she would only worship him.
Rahmat goes straight to Job, explains the arrangement, and he flies into a rage
vowing to whip her 100 times if he does in fact recover. When God does restore
Job’s fortune he instructs Job to strike his wife once with a palm branch having
a hundred leaves.(24) Here
Yahweh appears, to his credit, to be more lenient than his mortal counterpart.
One contemporary portrayal of Job’s wife accompanies this article, so let
us now turn to Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer winning play J. B. for an
equally compelling view. MacLeish calls Job’s wife "Sarah" and he gives her a
particularly strong voice. Here are the crucial bits of dialogue, which come
after all the children are dead:
J. B.: (a whisper) God, let me die!
Sarah: (her voice dead) You think
He’d help you even to that? God is our enemy.
J. B.: No. . .No. . .No. . .Don’t
say that Sarah! . . .
J. B.: God will not punish
without cause. God is just.
Sarah: (hysterically) God is just!
If God is just our slaughtered children stank with sin, were rotten with it! Oh,
my dear! my dear! my dear! Does God demand deception of us?–Purchase his
innocence by ours? Must we be guilty for Him? . . .
J. B. He knows the guilt is mine. He
must know: Has He not punished it? . . .
Sarah: I will not stay here if you
lie–Connive in your destruction, cringe to it: Not if you betray my children. .
.I will not stay to listen. They are dead and they were innocent: I will not let
you sacrifice their deaths to make injustice justice and God good!. . . If you
buy quiet with their innocence–theirs or yours. . .I will not love you.
J. B.: I have no choice but to be
guilty.
Sarah: We have the choice to live or
die, all of us. . . curse God and die. . . .(25)
She then walks out! Here is a woman telling the man she loves
that his submissive position is absurd and self-defeating. Here is a strong
woman who refuses to be a codependent like her husband. She refuses to
compromise with the one who is addicted, and she avoids rationalizing the
abusive behavior.
MacLeish offers us an instructive reversal. It is usually the woman who
plays J. B.’s role, the one, who in the face of abuse, continues to insist that
she must deserve the beatings she receives. The editors of Christianity,
Patriarchy, and Abuse observe that the reasons women give for staying in a
religion based on abuse are the same that women give who continue in violent
marriages.(26) The Catholic
bishops keep repeating that women cannot become priests because they cannot
"image" Jesus. But from the beginning, Christian women have been "imaging" Jesus
in what feminists would say are the most destructive ways. Few Christian men
have ever been held to the ideal of agap�, but all Christian women have
been expected to fulfill its impossible conditions.
In a 1959 review of J. B., Job scholar Samuel Terrien pinpoints the main
weakness of MacLeish’s play: he completely ignores the Promethean Job and casts
J. B. in the role of the pious codependent. While Terrien scores a debating
point here, I believe that he misunderstands Sarah’s role. (It is to Terrien’s
credit that he mentions Sarah at all. The other reviewers I read virtually
ignore her.) Rather than focus on her courageous stand against an abusive God,
Terrien instead praises her for returning to J.B. at the end. He further
degrades her role by claiming that her love for J. B. cannot substitute for the
true love of God. Sarah’s love, says Terrien, "is still bound by despair."(27)
According to Terrien, love can have meaning only within the context of hope, and
only an omnipotent God can provide that framework. Terrien argues that "because
J. B. is not a rebel, the intervention of the Lord speaking from the whirlwind
appears . . . as the irony of love which creates faith. . . ."(28)
Along with other commentators, I fail to find any expression of love,
ironic or otherwise, in Yahweh’s speech, let alone grounds for faith. Instead,
we find what Terrien accuses MacLeish of creating: "a manifestation of
impersonal and senseless power which produces in man only abject resignation."
We must reject Terrien’s non sequitur that Yahweh’s self-disclosure in the
whirlwind somehow reveals a God "who is infinitely concerned for the suffering
of humanity."(29) If Mitchell is
right that Job does not submit to a loving God, but surrenders to a cosmic
bully; and if others are correct in saying that Job is restored for standing up
to this abuse, then Terrien’s traditional reading is groundless. We must
conclude that the poetic Job refuses to accept his suffering as the sign of a
faithful and loving God, and that his wife may have well aided him in this
insight.
Although Job is mentioned only once in the New Testament, many have seen
his suffering as a prefiguration of the Passion of Christ. If this traditional
view is correct, it means that the ungodly abuse of Job is perpetuated in the
Christian tradition. "Divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and the child
who suffers ‘without even raising a voice’ is lauded as the hope of the world."(30)
An alternative analysis of the Book of Job, however, has uncovered the
possibility of Promethean Job, who does not compromise his integrity and who
does not validate his deity’s outrageous abuse of power. As Edwin Good states:
"Job thumbs his nose at the deity and proclaims. . . that justice will win out
in the universe, even if it entails the dethroning of the god."(31)
ENDNOTES
1. Anna Case-Winters,
God’s Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges
(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 27.
2. Mahabharata
3.31.34-7, trans. R. C. Zaehner, Concordant Discord (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 177.
3. Mahabharata
11.25.40-1 in ibid., p. 183.
4. Book of Poetry,
Shih, 2:5, 4, quoted in Chieu, The Tao of Chinese Religion (Lanham,
Maryland: University Press of America, 1984), p. 28.
5. George W. Rutler,
The Impatience of Job (La Salle: Sherwood & Sugden, 1981), p. 108.
6. See Marvin H.
Pope, The Anchor Bible: Job (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 23.
7. Luther’s Works
(Weimarausgabe), vol. 18, p. 709.
8. See Pope, op.
cit., p. 10.
9. Ibid., p. lxxxi;
Bernard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1957), p. 495.
10. The New Bible
Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), p. 637.
Italics added.
11. Edwin M. Cook,
"The Problem of Evil in the Book of Job" in The
Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, ed. Leo G. Perdue
and W. Clark Gilpin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), p. 66.
12. Norman C. Habel,
"In Defense of God the Sage" in The Voice from the Whirlwind, pp. 21-39.
13. Cook, op. cit.,
p. 69.
14. David Penchansky,
The Betrayal of God: Ideological Conflict in Job (Louisville: John
Knox/Westminster Press, 1990).
15. Robert M. Polzin,
Biblical Structuralism: Method and Subjectivity in the Study of Ancient Texts
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), p. 184.
16. Samuel Terrien,
"The Book of Job: Introduction and Exegesis" in The Interpreter’s Bible
(New York: Abingdon Press, 1954), vol. 3, p. 889.
17. Ernst Bloch,
Atheism and Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann (New York: Herder & Herder,
1972), p. 107.
18. Bruce Vawter,
Job and Jonah: Questioning the Hidden God (New York: Paulist Press, 1983),
p. 85.
19. David Robertson,
The Old Testament and the Literary Critic
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), p. 53.
20. Christian Duquoc,
"Demonism and the Unexpectedness of God" in Job and the Silence of God,
eds. Duquoc and Casiano Floristan (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1983), p. 86.
21. Stephen
Mitchell, The Book of Job (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), p.
xxv.
22. See Pope, op.
cit., pp. 22-23.
23. Mitchell, op.
cit., pp. xvi-vii.
24. Ibid., p. 23.
25. Archibald
MacLeish, J. B. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. 101-102; 109-110.
26. Joanne Carlson
Browne and Carole R. Bohn, eds., Christianity,
Patriarchy, and Abuse (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1989), p. 3.
27. Samuel Terrien,
"J. B. and Job," The Christian Century (January
7, 1959), p. 11.
28. Ibid., p. 10.
29. Ibid., p. 11.
30. Browne and
Parker, "Introduction" to Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse.
31. Cook, op. cit.,
p. 65. Cook admits that there is a less harsh way of reading these passages.