In the Job class today I spent a fair - but not inordinate - amount of time enthusing about one element in the brilliant way Carol Newsom represents her understanding of the Book of Job as if it were a piece of theater. We've been thinking about stagings for a while, a very effective way to get students to try to make sense of the book as a whole, and Newsom's take is the gold standard. It involves two separate teams of actors in different costume and manner, as well as disembodied voices from above and even the intrusion of an audience member - very avant garde! But at its heart is the moment highlit above, where Job, having heard the two speeches from the whirlwind, says ... something.
The final words uttered before this so very vocal person subsides into silence are, I gather, among the most difficult to translate in a text full of opaque and unparalleled formulations. The King James Version's penitential translation is familiar
I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
but there is as much textual warrant for something quite different, like Stephen Mitchell's blissed out
I will be quiet, comforted that I am but dust.
and maybe even also for Ed Greenstein's iconoclastic rendering (which we'll come to at the end of the class)
I am fed up; I take pity on dust and ashes.
Newsom makes the indeterminacy of this a feature, not a bug - though the audience may not know it. Consistent with her understanding of the Book of Job as a "dialogic" text whose last word is never spoken - passing the mic to us, whether we want it or not - the audience has to guess what Job said. What they guess will be shaped by the things they were able to hear and see, but the multiple voices they heard make it uncertain. It's frustrating, and generative.
Newsom's stage direction is also, I found myself rhapsodizing, deeply respectful of the privacy of Job, the intimacy of his experience. The words are not addressed to us, and the experience they report isn't one we can have just by hearing about it. My students may have heard that as the familar comforting platitude that "everything's subjective" but in this case perhaps it is, whether one understand the encounter Job had to have been deeply and unfathomably personal, or the opposite. He's earned that insight; we haven't.
