lter begins by introducing the anomalies in the Book of Job. “The Book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers…. The Book of Job belongs to the international movement of ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature in its universalist perspective—there are no Israelite characters in the text, though all the speakers are monotheists…. It is equally linked with Wisdom literature in its investigation of the problem of theodicy.”
Alter describes the majestic beauty of the Job poet’s verse. “The Book of Job is, of course, a theological argument, but it is a theological argument conducted in poetry…. Biblical poetry in general works through a system of intensifications, heightening or focusing or concretizing the utterance of the first verset of a line in the approximate semantic parallelism of the second verset…. All biblical poetry, because it is formally based in part on semantic parallelism, is driven to search for synonyms. No other biblical poet, however, exhibits the virtuosity in the command of rich synonymity that is displayed by the Job poet…. The other chief resource deployed in the poetry that Job speaks is its extraordinary metaphoric inventiveness…. The fecundity of metaphor, moreover, is allied with a keenly observant interest in the processes of nature that is also rather unusual for a biblical poet…. Still another source of metaphor tapped by the Job poet, beyond quotidian reality and nature, is mythology…. The third—and, ultimately, decisive—level of poetry in the book is manifested when the Lord addresses Job out of the whirlwind. Here, too, the Job poet’s keen interest in nature is evident…. God’s thundering challenge to Job is not bullying. Rather, it rousingly introduces a comprehensive overview of the nature of reality that exposes the limits of Job’s human perspective.”
Beautiful and arresting metaphors abound in the Book of Job. In Job 3:9, Alter relates, “the eyelids of dawn. This exquisite and surprising image—another hallmark of this poet’s originality—simultaneously indicates the first crack of light on the eastern horizon and the movement of the awakening person’s eyes taking in the first light of day.”
In Job 9:22-24, Alter details Job’s main argument against the Lord, “the blameless and the wicked he destroys. This single verset compactly summarizes Job’s argument against the mainline biblical notion of God’s justice. Observing the reality of human events, including, of course, the disasters that have beset him, he sees no neat system of reward for the virtuous and punishment for the transgressor: the purported system of divine justice is essentially arbitrary…. He mocks the innocent’s plight…. God’s mockery of the innocent makes him not just arbitrary but sadistic…. The earth is given in the wicked man’s hand. Job now steps up his argument. God is not merely arbitrary; he actually tilts the conduct of the world to favor the wicked.”
Alter points out the aspects of Wisdom literature that appear in the book. In Job 37:24, he relates, “He does not regard all the wise of heart. As the Hymn to Wisdom concluded in Job 28:28, “fear of the Master, that is wisdom,” and God has no special regard for those who imagine they have attained understanding independently through the exercise of intellect. This final line would be a last rebuke to Job, who has had the presumption to think he knows how the system of divine justice should work and hence dared to challenge God.”
In Job 39:30, Alter describes the brutal honest reality that the Job poet versifies, “His chicks lap up blood. One of the remarkable aspects of the Job poet’s vision of nature is that it is so completely unsentimental…. The concluding image, then, of God’s first speech is of the fledgling eagles in the nest, their little beaks open to gulp down the bloody scraps of flesh that their parent has brought them. The moral calculus of nature clearly does not jibe with the simple set of equations and consequences laid out in Proverbs and Psalms.”
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