Job is a righteous man from Transjordana who is deliberately made to suffer by God. The deity, incited by the Satan (see Job 2:3; ha-satan is Hebrew for “the adversary”)—the angel who is charged with finding fault with human beings—wants to discover how deeply Job’s piety runs. If all his worldly goods, his servants and his children are taken from him, will he adhere to his faithfulness? If he is afflicted with a painful disease, will he accept his fate—or will he curse the deity that has dealt him such an undeserved blow?
The reader of the Book of Job knows why Job has been singled out for suffering: He is not being punished for any sin; he is being tested by God. But Job and his three companions do not know that. After listening to Job rant and rave—he curses his life and claims that God persecutes him—his friends come to believe that his afflictions must be a punishment for sin—even if they do not know what it might be. Job himself comes to believe that God must be holding him accountable for some transgression, even though he cannot, for the life of him, imagine what it is.
Like anyone else (well exemplified by the character Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial) Job wants to know what the charges against him are. Only God knows. This point is made by Job’s companion Zophar (Job 11:5–6):
But if only God would speak,
And open his lips with you,
And reveal to you the secrets of wisdom—
For there are two sides to wisdom—
You should know that God is making you forget your sin.1
According to my understanding, Zophar admits that Job may be telling the truth when he claims he is innocent. Job does not know what sin he has committed. “There are two sides to wisdom”—one side is accessible to us, and one side is known only to God. Job’s sin is in the latter category of esoteric 056 wisdom. If God would disclose the secret to Job, that should silence him and end what appears to Zophar to be his blasphemy.
Nevertheless, Job wants to know what charges the deity seems to be holding over his head. The way to bring God and God’s supposed bill of indictment out into the open is clear to Job. He must sue God.2 Job knows his way around the legal system. As he relates, in reminiscing about his glory days in the past, Job had served as a local magistrate. People with grievances approached Job to resolve them (Job 29:12, 14, 16):
For I would rescue the poor who cries out,
And the fatherless with no one to help him …
I clothed myself in right, and it clothed me;
Like my robe and my turban, my justice [clothed me] …
A father was I to those in need;
I would investigate the complaint even of someone I did not know.
The idea of suing God has a precedent in Jeremiah, and, as I have shown elsewhere, much of Job’s rhetoric and ideas are inspired by the early-sixth-century B.C.E. prophet.3 Jeremiah did not think there is a point to taking God to court—not because he did not have a case, but because he believed that in a lawcourt God’s prestige would ensure him victory (see Jeremiah 12:1).
Job, too, hesitated to sue God formally. At first, he only entertained the idea. If he were to press the lawsuit in earnest, the deity would not respond, “not once in a thousand cases” (Job 9:2; compare verses 14–17). Moreover, God’s power leaves any who attack him in shambles (verse 3). God would dismiss any litigation with a “push on the hairline” (verse 17)—a gesture known from 17th-century B.C.E. Alalakh, an ancient city in north Syria, today on the Turkish side of the border.4
Convinced that God is corrupt, Job goes so far as to claim that even if God knew he was innocent, he would falsely incriminate him. God would lower him into a muddy pit, covering him with grime (Job 9:30–31). In ancient Hebrew terminology (as in modern English), cleanliness is a metaphor for legal innocence. Accordingly, dirt is a metaphor for guilt. The deity, Job maintains, would make him look guilty—frame him in order to justify Job’s suffering. There are two obstacles to taking God to court, Job reiterates (9:33–34): First, no one could serve as a neutral arbiter in a conflict between Job and the deity; second, God would use his awesome power to intimidate him. So Job does not yet actualize his lawsuit.
When Zophar accuses Job of some assumed transgression that God has hidden from his consciousness, however, and reminds Job that only God holds the key to the mystery of his suffering, Job decides he has nothing to lose, and he initiates a formal litigation against God (Job 13:14–15):
I will take my flesh (that is, my self) in my teeth,
Job repeats his concern that God will not meet him in a fair trial. He begs God not to intimidate him (verses 20–21):
Only two things you must not do to me—
Then will I not hide from your face:
Put your hand far from upon me,
And do not terrify me with your awesome demeanor!
Job is ready to press his lawsuit against God, confident that he is in the right (verse 18). He offers to let God begin, or else he will state his charges first (verse 22). But he is desperate to learn what God is holding over his head (verse 23):
How many are my crimes and my sins?
My transgression and my sin—tell me what they are!
Job presents his litigation again in chapter 23 (verses 4–5).
Before proceeding, this point should be made: Most scholars regard Job’s lawsuit as a metaphor. It can’t be real because a person cannot actually litigate with God. I strongly disagree. 057 Job is not constrained by what is ordinarily impossible. When Job, pushed to an extreme, sought to undo his very being, he laid a curse on the day of his birth and the night of his conception (Job 3:3–10). He was not deterred by the notion that such a thing was beyond the realm of possibility. When the real becomes unbearable, it has been said, people turn to the surreal. So, too, with Job’s lawsuit. It is real, not only for Job but also, as we shall see, for God.
Job’s problem is: how to get the deity to respond to his suit? To overcome this obstacle, Job uses his legal expertise. In ancient Near Eastern law proceedings, there is no state prosecutor. One person brings charges against another.6 To support one’s charges, one brings witnesses and evidence. But what if, as in Job’s claims against God, there are no witnesses and no material evidence? Then an accused party can take an exculpatory oath—an oath in which one swears to one’s innocence.
There is a nice example in Exodus 22:9–10.7 If someone deposits an animal with someone else for safekeeping, and the animal dies or breaks down, and “there is no one to see”—that is, no witness—“there shall be an oath (in the name of) the LORD between the two parties, (swearing) that he (the keeper) did not extend his hand into (misappropriate) the property of his fellow; the owner shall take (his animal) and he (the keeper) need not compensate him.” In the absence of direct testimony or evidence, an oath, taken in God’s name, is sufficient in civil cases.
From Job’s point of view, he is the accused party—and in the course of suing God, Job is in a real sense answering the putative divine charges. The way to answer God and at the same time compel the deity to respond is to take a series of exculpatory oaths.8 In the latter half of Job’s final speech, in chapters 30–31, Job swears up and down that he has not committed any number of possible transgressions—from theft and adultery to turning away the needy. It has been widely noted that there is a parallel in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Facing the justices in the realm of the dead, the newly deceased swears that he has not committed this or that sin. In ancient Mesopotamia, legal proceedings could be initiated by one party taking an oath. In the ancient Hebrew inscription from Metsad Hashavyahu (a mile south of Yavneh Yam), a harvester who claims to have been wronged adduces witnesses—and swears to his innocence.9
Once Job has eliminated virtually any transgression for which God could be punishing him, there is only one way to answer Job: God must appear. Like a belligerent warrior god, the deity appears “out of the storm” (Job 38:1). The divine discourses are complex and cannot be adequately interpreted by means of any one approach. However, with regard to the framework of Job’s legal claims, the purpose of God’s appearance is to settle Job’s case. For some reason (or lack of reason), God does not respond to the substance of Job’s accusations—that he is unjust in his dealings with people.
God, whom the patriarch Abraham has described as “the Judge of All the Earth” (Genesis 18:25), knows the law even better than Job. Cleverly he throws Job’s case out on a technicality. Job claims to know things about God. He claims to be a witness to the divine governance of the world. However, from a technical point of view, a witness must directly see and/or hear the object of his testimony. God, in a bullying manner, challenges Job’s status as a proper witness (see Job 38:2ff.). Job could not know how God runs the world because God had revealed these mysteries only at the time of creation, and neither Job nor any other person bore witness to that grandest of all events (see, e.g., Proverbs 3:19–20, 8:22–31; Job 28:20–27). Sarcastically, God upbraids Job (8:4, 21):
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Tell me—if you truly know wisdom …
You must know, for you were born then?
The number of your days is many!
Job cannot reply to such a dressing down. He realizes that his lawsuit has come to naught. He will never discover the cause of his suffering. But he can take satisfaction in having forced the deity to respond without contradicting Job’s belief that he is in the right.
Job is a righteous man from Transjordana who is deliberately made to suffer by God. The deity, incited by the Satan (see Job 2:3; ha-satan is Hebrew for “the adversary”)—the angel who is charged with finding fault with human beings—wants to discover how deeply Job’s piety runs. If all his worldly goods, his servants and his children are taken from him, will he adhere to his faithfulness? If he is afflicted with a painful disease, will he accept his fate—or will he curse the deity that has dealt him such an undeserved blow? The reader of the Book of […]
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The land of Uz, where Job lives, is associated with Edom and is located in the land of Kedem, meaning “East.”
Endnotes
1.
All translations are my own. My annotated translation of the Book of Job, when completed, will be published by Yale University Press.
2.
The present article is based on my study, Edward L. Greenstein, “A Forensic Understanding of the Speech from the Whirlwind,” in Michael V. Fox et al., eds., Texts, Temples, and Traditions: A Tribute to Menahem Haran (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996), pp. 241–258.
3.
See my article, “Jeremiah as an Inspiration to the Poet of Job,” in John Kaltner and Louis Stulman, eds., Inspired Speech: Prophecy in the Ancient Near East—Essays in Honor of Herbert B. Huffmon (London-New York: T &T Clark International/Continuum, 2004), pp. 98–110.
4.
See Donald J. Wiseman, The Alalakh Tablets (London: British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1953), p. 38; see also Greenstein, “A Forensic Understanding,” pp. 257–258. For a different interpretation of the gesture, see Meir Malul, Studies in Mesopotamian Legal Symbolism (Kevalaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn: Butzon & Bercker/Neukirchener Verlag, 1988), pp. 432–439.
5.
In this translation, I am reading the Ketiv (what is written) l’ “not” for the Qere (what the Masoretic scribes wanted us to read) lw “for him”; and I am reading “his ways” for the Masoretic Text’s “my ways,” which makes no sense and results from an ancient pious correction (tiqqun soferim), intended to protect God’s honor. Compare Job 21:31.
6.
In addition to the sources cited in Greenstein, “A Forensic Understanding,” see especially F. Rachel Magdalene, On the Scales of Righteousness: Neo-Babylonian Trial Law and the Book of Job (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2007). Magdalene interprets Job’s lawsuit somewhat differently.
7.
This is not the place to discuss the complex, but apt, example of the suspected adulteress in Numbers 5.
8.
See especially Michael B. Dick’s two studies: “The Legal Metaphor in Job 31, ” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 41 (1979), pp. 37–50; “Job 31, the Oath of Innocence, and the Sage,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 95 (1983), pp. 31–53.
9.
For the first publication, see Joseph Naveh, “A Hebrew Letter from the Seventh Century B.C.,” Israel Exploration Journal 10 (1960), pp. 129–139; idem, “More Hebrew Inscriptions from Mesad Hashavyahu,” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962), pp. 27–32. For complete up-to-date reading and commentary, see Shmuel Ahituv, Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008), pp. 156–163; F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, J.J.M. Roberts, C.L. Seow, and R.E. Whitaker, Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven-London: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 358–370.
