Canter Bridge

Job’s bitter audacity in challenging God’s ways is perhaps matched only by his ironic familiarity with biblical traditions that place the deity in a more favorable light.

Scholars debate the degree to which the author of the book of Job is interacting with actual biblical texts. Regardless, he knows intimately the traditions that have nourished those texts and deploys his verbal expertise to stand them on their head.

Two of the finest biblical psalms speak of the Lord’s remarkable attentiveness to humans and their affairs and the corollary impossibility of discovering a place so remote that the divine presence cannot accompany one:

The eighth psalm touches the first point:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.

The one hundred thirty-ninth psalm underscores the second:

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,’
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

With stupendous irony Job accesses these affirmations about divine presence and rule. Yet where the psalmist derives infinite comfort from the same set of facts, Job discovers only torment. He would wish away God’s accompaniment, he would find in darkness not the insistent presence of his Lord but relief in his absence. A sample hints at the thread of ironic reinterpretation of biblical motifs that runs through Job’s harrassed verbosity:

What are human beings, that you make so much of them,
that you set your mind on them,
visit them every morning,
test them every moment?
Will you not look away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle?
If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
Why have you made me your target?
Why have I become a burden to you?
Why do you not pardon my transgression
and take away my iniquity?
For now I shall lie in the earth;
you will seek me, but I shall not be.

The biblical anthologists’ own audacity—like Job’s it points at resolution of the inherent contradictions it allows itself to declare—is evident in the inclusion of such a counter-pious manifest in the scriptural collection. What is one to make of a faith that harbors in its constitutional literature such bold questioning, such irreverent probing, such tolerance of possibilities so remote from convention that a malignant deity figures among the choices?

Perhaps the question is too large. A smaller one then: How dare one venture out into the world without first marinating in the possibilities that one’s own faith insists upon placing in our way, inside our consciousness, before our collection of hopes and fears?