I've been invited to address the instructors for the Columbia Core on the Book of Job, one of their texts for the semester. (Not the only text from the Bible, I was happy to ascertain; they're also reading Genesis, Song of Songs, and the Gospels of Luke and John.) I've long known that Job often appears in great books curricula, but never had a chance to really think about what it would do to Job to encounter it in this context - or what Job might do to the context.
What I'm thinking of offering is a three part way into Job with a coda. First, I'll encourage them to focus on the most compelling speeches of Job and of God. Let them hear Job's grief and accusation at divine indifference and the surpassing nature poetry of God's response - and the apparent gap between them. Both Job's gut-wrenching vertigo and God's thrilling paean to the non-human world have been celebrated as surpassing examples of the sublime. And beyond that - the gulf between Job's complaint, focused on his own and ultimately all humanity's fate, and a divine response which never mentions humans at all, is as awe-ful now as it ever was. And the resolution in 42:6, is as powerful as it is obscure. I'll suggest that how we understand Job's final words determines the meaning of the whole thing.
Second, we'll zoom out to the larger context, starting with God's words at 42:7 (and 8) that his "servant Job" has "spoken rightly of me," unlike the friends. Is Job's bitter arraignment of God thus given divine imprimatur?! Or perhaps God is praising only Job's words at 42:6, whatever they were? I'll point out that 42:7 appear in the prose epilogue, and then talk a little about the apparent disjunction between the poetic speeches and the folk-tale like frame. I'll mention the temptation among moderns to shear off the frame story as unworthy of the sublime core of the book, and urge folks to resist the temptation. Not only has Job shaped cultures for two and a half millennia in this full form, but, properly understood, each of the components plays a vital part. I might suggest what I ask my students to do: to imagine staging it.
Finally, I'll turn to the question of Job and canonical wisdom. I'll start with the question of what Job is doing in the scriptural canon in the first place, and how it shows biblical traditions to be richer and more complicated than many an enlightenment critique of supposedly blind and unquestioning faith supposes. If God's words in 42:7 vindicate and even authorize Job's unfiltered words, the inclusion of the Book of Job in the canon of scripture does the same. Job shows us how to confront incomprehensible fate - not with docility but with persistent demands for recognition... and perhaps in the company of other questioners.
I'll wrap up with Job's friends, and urge folks not to dismiss them as insincere or hypocritical. They represent the best wisdom known - the very wisdom which has sustained Job up to this point. The experience of reading the Book of Job can't just be the new revelations of the integrity of the human and the sublimity of the divine but must include the collapse of all received knowledge even before these arrive under the weight of human suffering. As a frontal attack on received knowledge, the Book of Job actually fits uneasily into any canon, since it suggests not only that canonical knowledge closes us to some of the profoundest mysteries of existence, but that it can provide a refuge from which we refuse to face these mysteries. Warning word to the wise, canonizers of scripture but also of great books.
And the coda: where, then, should we locate ourselves as readers and interpreters of the text? In the space where Job meets God? Outside the whole thing, with the editors of the tale? Both are presumptuous. We're in line behind Elihu, called to the impossible but necessary task of being friends.
