They’re hard to take, these friends-Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar, droning away. Now some friends of Job appear and offer, one after another, the conventional pieties: God is great, Job must have done something wrong, how dare he question the ways of the Lord, etc. Because he’s been in us since the beginning, since the first germ of our separateness from everything else-a man confronting the mystery, as if there was a strand of our DNA in the shape of a question mark: Why? ![]() “For what did knees have to receive me? For what were the breasts that I sucked?” And later: “Why have you made me your target?” This is where we moderns, we dopes marooned in the universe, love Job and find brotherhood with him. “Why couldn’t I die after leaving the womb-Just go out the loins and stop breathing?” his Job demands. But the shock of repudiation is undiminished. His language is lumpy with scholarly fidelity to the text. A professor emeritus of Bible studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, Greenstein is not going for the deep-time sonorities of the Authorized Version. Greenstein’s new translation of the Book of Job is a work of erudition with-as we shall see-a revolutionary twist. That first prickle of my existence, the point of light with my name on it? Turn around, All-Fathering One, and eclipse it. Dispossessed of everything, he is choosing nothing. Howls of despair are a biblical staple, but Job’s self-curse-the special physics of it, the suicidal pulse that he sends backwards, like a black rainbow, toward the hour of his own conception-is singular. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it let a cloud dwell upon it let the blackness of the day terrify it.” “Let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. “Let that day be darkness,” as the King James Version has it. He sits on an ash heap, seeping and scratching, and reviles the day he was born. Job, poor bastard, doesn’t.Īfter his herds have been finished off by marauders and gushes of heavenly fire, and his children have been flattened by falling masonry, and he himself has been covered in running sores from head to toe-after all this happens to the blameless man, he cracks. We, the readers and inheritors of his book, know this. Piped-in oxygen, controlled light, keep the drinks coming. What is life? It’s a bleeping and blooping Manichaean casino: You’re up or you’re down, in God’s hands or the devil’s. Job is going to be immiserated, sealed into sorrow-for a bet. A classic Old Testament skit, pungent as a piece of absurdist theater or a story by Kafka. The Trumplike deity the shrewd and loitering adversary the cruelly flippant wager and the stooge, the cosmic straight man, Job, upon whose oblivious head the sky is about to fall. That-give or take a couple of verses-is how it starts, the Book of Job. Take it all away from him, and I bet you he’ll curse you to your face.” And God says, “You’re on.” “The rich, happy, healthy guy? The guy with 3,000 camels? Of course he does. He thinks I’m the greatest.” “Job?” says Satan. So God says to Satan, “You there, what have you been up to?” And Satan says, “Oh, you know, just hanging around, minding my own business.” And God says, “Well, take a look at my man Job over there.
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