Job
Edited by
James E. Harding [+–]
University of Otago
James Harding is Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, Department of Theology, at the University of Otago, and an Anglican priest in the Diocese of Dunedin.
The story of Job is often read as a simple tale of innocent suffering. A pious man is put to the test, proves his faithfulness, and is richly rewarded. Yet the book of Job is perhaps the most linguistically challenging and theologically complex work in the Hebrew scriptures. The reception of the book in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and modern biblical scholarship, has shown that neither the book of Job nor its protagonist are in any way simple. The book is, furthermore, about far more than the problem of innocent suffering.
Aimed primarily at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this volume introduces some of the most significant recent approaches to the book of Job, drawing on a variety of exegetical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives. It challenges the predominance of western perspectives on the book of Job by incorporating approaches to the book from Africa, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Pacific. The essays cover the poetics of the book and the challenges of translating it, the history of composition and reception, the use of irony and metaphor, intertextual allusion, the figure of Job’s wife, constructions of femininity and masculinity, justice, ethics, ecology, creation, post-humanism, the body, the place of Job in early Judaism and Christianity, theological exegesis, trauma hermeneutics, and the reception of Job in modern philosophy. The collection concludes with a postcolonial Moana reading of Leviathan and a profound engagement with the ambiguities of Job’s final response to the deity.
This volume will be first published online and then as a print book.
Chapters 1 and 4 published online in 2025.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Bar-Ilan University
Edward L. Greenstein is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. A prolific scholar in both biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, his Job: A New Translation (Yale, 2019) has won wide acclaim, and he was awarded the highly distinguished EMET Prize in Israel.
The language of the book of Job is especially difficult for a host of reasons. The poet uses archaic language and spelling to set the story in a much earlier era, that of Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs. The poet uses foreign language and invented vocabulary to enhance the poetics of the discourse. The speakers are meant to be Easterners, and the poet colors their language with eastern features. The poet works in metaphors and images that are not always clear. The poet thinks out of the box so that conventional meanings must be set aside in favor of idiosyncratic ones. The poet’s language often relies on allusions to earlier Hebrew texts and to motifs that were current in the ancient Near Eastern world. Without recognizing those allusions and familiarity with those motifs, one may fail to grasp an expression or argument. All these features of the language of Job challenge the reader and, even more so, the translator, who cannot convey all these features. Illustrations of the features and their challenges are presented in this essay.
Chapter 4
Kölner Hochschule für Katholische Theologie
Tobias Häner, born 1978 in Switzerland. Dissertation on the Book of Ezekiel in 2014 (University of Augsburg), published by Herder Verlag (2016). Habilitation on the Book of Job in 2023 (University of Vienna), published by Mohr Siebeck (2024). Since then professor of Old Testament at the Cologne University of Catholic Theology.
The deliberate use of ambiguity and irony plays an important but often underestimated role in the book of Job. The juxtaposition of the narrative framework, which portrays Job as a model of submissive patience and faith, with Job’s accusations and verbal attacks against God in the poetic core, creates an unavoidable ambiguity concerning the central character of the book. In the prologue, the sixfold recurrence of the ambiguous verb berekh, “to bless/praise/curse” allows for the possibility that Job might in fact have “cursed” God (Job 1:21), as predicted by the Satan, while pretending to “praise” him. In the dialogue with his friends, Job questions his interlocutors’ pretense of wisdom and superior knowledge by means of rhetorical irony (“No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you” – Job 12:2). Yet in the end it is Yhwh who, in the divine speeches addressed to Job, makes use of irony in order to make him realize the limits of his insights into God’s rule of the world. On the whole, ambiguity and irony serve as crucial rhetorical means of challenging traditional wisdom and thereby point to the limits of human knowledge.
