Remember Job? I'm teaching my course on the Book of Job and the arts again next semester. I thought it might be a good way to get back to it, and with enough time meaningfully to revise the storyline if needed, to read this brand new translation. But this isn't just any new translation. Edward L. Greenstein is Vergil to Job's Inferno. He's spent three decades parsing every word. Finding the fruit of his research in this form is a major event.Greenstein thinks the text's vaunted obscurities are the result of centuries of error and timidity. A certain number of scribal errors are to be expected, especially with a text as linguistically rich and adventurous as this, and it wouldn't be surprising for some whole passages to have fallen out of sequence when papyrus came unglued (or was unbundled to accommodate the addition of Elihu). But the timidity of editors and translators had to do also with the "fundamentally amoral world"(166) the text describes, which they couldn't, or wouldn't, see,
Greenstein claims to have restored the text to something like its original form (post Elihu). The headliner, I suppose, is that, in the face of the bullying bluster of YHWH, Job doesn't concede or recant, let alone repent in dust and ashes. Instead, his final words (42:5-6, later commended by YHWH for their "honesty" at 42:8) are:
As a hearing by the ear I have heard you.
And now my eye has seen you.
That is why I am fed up;
I take pity on "dust and ashes" [=suffering humanity].
(Yale UP, 2019), 185
But this comes at the end of a fundamentally different story than the received one. It's not just the textual emendations, and clarification of the many ways in which Job and his friends respond to (and parody) each other and engage the language of other biblical texts - though these are significant in their own right. What changes the whole flow of the story is the restoration of 4:12-21, a vision, from Eliphaz to Job.
And my ear grasped a hint of it.
In shudders from visions of the night,
When slumber falls upon people.
Fear overcame me, and trembling;
As shivers set my bones to shaking.
For a spirit passed across my face;
It set the hair of my flesh on end.
It stood still, but I could not discern its demeanor,
(Nor) the form in front of my eyes.
A moaning and voice did I hear:
"Can a mortal be righteous before Eloah?
Can a man be pure before his maker?
If in his servants he puts no trust,
And in his angels he finds fault,
Then all the more those who dwell in clay houses,
Whose foundation is in the dust.
They are quashed before twilight;
From day-break until evening they are crushed;
When it is not even nightfall they forever disappear.
Their tent-pin is pulled up on them;
They die without (ever finding) knowledge." (16-18)
It never really made sense coming from Eliphaz, disconnected as it is from Eliphaz' arguments. It's been assimilated to Job's view for years, in fact, from Jewish liturgical song to Calvin (although all of these folks presumably encountered the same corrupted sequence Greenstein is repairing!). Restoring it to Job makes sense of much else in the text, too, from Job's complaint of being tormented by nightmares and visions (7:14) to the friends' accusation that he claims he's got inside knowledge of the divine court (15:4, 8). It also lines up with the lines in Elihu's speeches about God speaking, just once, to people in frightening nighttime dreams (33:14-17).
New questions arise, too. Who is this "renegade" or "rogue spirit" (Greenstein's terms) who speaks to Job? Elihu, who we can assume heard of Job's nighttime vision, thinks it came from the top. But was it sent by YHWH? Greenstein doesn't mention the possibility it might be the Satan, but there must be a reason he calls it "rogue." Stepping back a bit, who wrote this whole uncompromisingly unconsoling story, and for whom? How did it end up canonized - before or after the consciously and unconsciously pious changes to it? And did the real story somehow keep being told alongside the canonical version, the way the pious frame story did in the "legend of Job"? (Greenstein doesn't even mention debates about the primacy of prose frame or poetic center of the book.)
It's all quite exciting but it confronts me with a quandary. Should I give next semester's students this translation to read? If so, you can be sure that many will write off the whole history of Job reception - the reception of the erroneous text Greenstein claims to have corrected - as illegitimate, as presumably would he, the twisting in the wind of a tradition fundamentally unwilling to let the text speak.
I've tended always to go at least part way with "literary" approaches to the Bible, putting to one side what we're learning through historical and philological research about the problems with the texts we've inherited, and focusing instead on the text as we find it, as it finds us. Asking those sorts of text historical/critical questions is a relatively new thing, and should come near the end of this text's effective history. But I'm also persuaded by Carol Newsom that the problems Job engages resist closure, requiring the unsettling and never-ended dialogue on the level of moral imaginations the book of Job as we find it enacts. Greenstein might give glib students the chance to say it's an open and shut case.
But still, I need to start them off somewhere. I've tended to punt on this, recommending Raymond Scheindlin's translation but letting them read any version they have access to, so long as they subsequently compare it with another, and with the King James Version. Greenstein's Job, though, is qualitatively different from all of these. What to do?
