For nearly half a century, Robert Alter has been reading and analyzing the books of the Hebrew Bible as works of literature and has become a towering presence in the world of biblical translation.

To be sure, he has built upon the literary studies of earlier scholars going back a couple of centuries. But, unlike the vast majority of previous translators, he has eschewed doctrinal questions in determining how to render the ancient Hebrew into English. He has approached translation as a literary critic and poet, not as a theologian.

And he has found a wide audience for his work — seven books between 1999 and 2015 that put various portions of scripture into English, and then his capstone, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, a 3,000-page work published in 2018.

And, after all that work of going in detail through all the books of Hebrew scripture, Alter still asserts, as he did three decades earlier, that the Book of Job is “arguably the greatest achievement of all biblical poetry.”

This is a judgement that Alter made in The Art of Biblical Poetry when it was originally published in 1985. And he repeats it in the revised 2011 edition.

 

God’s test of Job

Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, for the past five decades, notes that the Book of Job begins with “a seemingly naïve tale”:

Job is an impeccably God-fearing man, happy in his children and in his abundant possessions. Unbeknownst to him, in the celestial assembly the Adversary — despite the traditional translations, not yet a mythological Satan — challenges God to test the disinterestedness of Job’s piety by afflicting him.

When Job, in rapid succession, has been bereft of all his various flocks and servants and then of all his children, and is stricken from head to foot with itching sores, he refuses his wife’s urging that he curse God and die but instead sits down in the dust in mournful resignation.

At this point, Alter writes, the prose frame-story “switches into altogether remarkable poetry” that immediately plunges the reader “precipitously into a world of what must be called abysmal intensities.”

Job wishes that he had never been born. His friends tell him it’s all his fault — it must be his fault for some evil-doing. But Job isn’t buying this:

Job consistently refuses to compromise the honesty of his own life, and in refuting the friends’ charges he repeatedly inveighs against God’s crushing unfairness.

Eventually, God answers Job out of a whirlwind, mainly to show how presumptuous this human critic of divine justice has been.

 

“The poetic vehicle of the book”

The poetic genius of the Book of Job is rooted in the poet’s ability to plumb the profound depths of meaning, morality and emotions:

It is only through the most brilliant use of a system of poetic intensifications that the poet is able to take the full emotional measure and to intimate the full moral implications of Job’s outrageous fate.

The Book of Job wrestles with the question of how God can permit bad things to happen to good people, and it does so not just with ideas but also with the power and revelation of poetry. Indeed, Alter argues that

the exploration of the problem of theodicy in the Book of Job and the “answer” it proposes cannot be separated from the poetic vehicle of the book, and that one misses the real intent by reading the text, as has too often been done, as a paraphrasable philosophic argument merely embellished or made more arresting by poetic devices.

 

“A muscular compactness”

The poet of the Book of Job, Alter writes, “is one of those rare poets, like Shakespeare, who combine awesome expressive power with dazzling stylistic virtuosity.”

And who are very difficult to translate.  Indeed, Alter points out that translation dilutes the original Hebrew text of Job much more than other less sophisticated, less artistically fashioned biblical poems. (Consider how difficult it must be to translate, say, King Lear into Korean or Russian.)

The original has a muscular compactness that is extremely difficult to reproduce while finding honest equivalents for the Hebrew words in a Western language, and it makes repeated and sometimes highly significant use of sound-play and wordplay.

 

“Cosmic bullying?”

Essentially, after Job’s many complaints, the Voice in the Whirlwind tells him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about — that he can’t know what he’s talking about since God is so much wider, deeper, taller and more complex than a mere human being.

For centuries, commentators have found this frustrating and dissatisfying. Alter summarizes these objections:

[T]he Voice’s answer is no answer at all but an attempt to overwhelm poor Job by an act of cosmic bullying.

Job, in his sense of outrage over underserved suffering, has been pleading for simple justice. God ignores the issue of justice, not deigning to explain why innocent children should perish, decent men and women writhe in affliction, and instead sarcastically asks Job how good he is at hurling lightning bolts, marking the sun rise and set, causing rain to fall, fixing limits to the breakers of the sea.

The clear implication is that if you can’t begin to play in my league, you should not have the nerve to ask questions about the rules of the game.

 

“With the eyes of God”

What has been missed, however, in the complaints of scholars and theologians is, Alter asserts, the essential role that poetry plays in this revelation.

If the poetry of Job…looms above all other biblical poetry in virtuosity and sheer expressive power, the culminating poem that God speaks out of the storm soars beyond everything that has preceded it in the book, the poet having wrought a poetic idiom even richer and more awesome than the one he gave Job.

Through this pushing of poetic expression toward its own upper limits, the concluding speech helps us see the panorama of creation, as perhaps we could do only through poetry, with the eyes of God.

 

A great death-wish poem

Job’s friends talk in theological cliches, but he speaks out of anguish and fury:

Annul the day that I was born,

and the night that said, “a man is conceived.”

 

That day, let it be darkness,

let God above not seek it out,

nor brightness shine upon it.

Job wants barrenness on the night of his conception. He wants the stars to go dark, and the dawn to never happen.  He longs for the grave.

Job’s cry, Alter writes, is a great death-wish poem, “a powerful, evocative, authentic expression of man’s essential, virtually ineluctable egotism: the anguished speaker has seen, he feels, all too much, and he wants now to see nothing at all, to be enveloped in the blackness of the womb/tomb, enclosed by dark doors that will remain shut forever.”

It is as exquisite a declaration of the pain and sorrow at the heart of all human life as, perhaps, as ever been written. If life is not fair, Job does not want to live. And nothing about life is more unfair than the truth that each human is born to die, is given life only to lose it.

 

“The splendor and vastness of life”

God, however, turns this plaint inside out. In contrast to “all this withdrawal inward and turning out of lights,” God’s poem demonstrates the power and energy of God’s panoramic vision.

Instead of the death wish, it affirms from line to line the splendor and vastness of life, beginning with a cluster of arresting images of the world’s creation and going on to God’s sustaining of the world in the forces of nature and in the variety of the animal kingdom.

Instead of darkness and numbness, God’s poem “progresses through a grand sweeping movement that carries us over the length and breadth of the created world, from sea to sky to the unimaginable recesses where snow and winds are stored, to the lonely wastes and craggy heights where only the grass or the wildest of animals lives.”

Where were you when I founded earth?

Tell, if you know understanding…

 

Who hedged the sea with double doors,

when it gushed forth from the womb,

 

when I made cloud its clothing,

and thick mist its swaddling bands?…

 

Does the rain have a father,

or who begot the drops of dew?

 

From whose belly did the ice come forth,

to the frost of the heavens who gave birth?

The contrast is striking — between the smallness and timidness and ego-centric blindness of Job and the huge, vast, dynamic world that God depicts.

 

“Exponentially more beautiful”

Even so, as Alter notes, God’s poem is not a direct answer to Job’s questions. God’s answer does not spell out in human logic and reason how the unfairness of life is actually fair.

Job’s poetry was an instrument for probing, against the stream of the Friends’ platitudes, the depths of his own understandable sense of outrage over what befell him.

On an artistic level — in terms of word-play, metaphor, tone, sound and the full gamut of poetic technique ­— God’s poem isn’t simply a response to Job’s complaints.  It is exponentially more beautiful, most startling, more intellectually rich, more emotionally resonant, more vibrant and vital.

God’s poem enables Job to glimpse beyond his human plight an immense world of power and beauty and awesome warring forces. This world is permeated with God’s ordering concern, but…it presents to the human eye a welter of contradictions, dizzying variety, energies and entities that man cannot take in.

 

“By ear’s rumor”

Up until this point, Job has been judging the Creator. Now, after God’s two-part poem in response, Job “humbly admits that he has been presumptuous, has in fact ‘obscured counsel’ about things he did not understand.”

Alter notes that, at the end, Job declares that, from the Voice, he has gained sight — “the glimpse of an ungraspable creation surging with the power of its Creator.”

Or, as the poet of the Book of Job has the man say, using a metaphor that Shakespeare might have come up with:

“By the ear’s rumor I heard of you,

and now my eyes have seen you.”

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.2.25

 

Written by : Patrick T. Reardon

For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.

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