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Dramatic Irony and Double Entendre in the Book of Job *

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Dramatic Irony and Double Entendre in the Book of Job * Naphtali Meshel Whose Job Is This? Dramatic Irony and double entendre in the Book of Job * וֹבּ יּוֹם שׁ הוֹ ן הוֹ נוֹס א ד יּוֹב ת קוֹם א ה שנ' ן יי לוֹ יל ין ר קוּל לוֹא= י ה אוֹ יי ה לוֹ1 On that day Joshua son of Horqanos expounded: “Job served God only out of love, since it is said, If he slay me, I will yearn for him (Job 13:15). But still the matter is equivocal [as to whether it means], ‘I shall pine for him,’ or ‘I shall pine away.’” 1 Introduction Two literary techniques long recognized as being highly developed in the Book of Job are dramatic irony and double entendre.2 These techniques are a com- mon heritage of Biblical Wisdom Literature3 and of ancient Near Eastern litera- * I thank the participants of the conference, as well as Prof. Yohanan Grinshpon, Dr. Itamar Kislev, Jessica O’Rourke-Suchoff, Ayelet Wenger, and the participants of the 2012 Weinfeld Symposium of the Bible Department at the Hebrew University, for many valuable comments. I thank Prof. Baruch Schwartz for discussing many details with me, and Prof. Gary Rendsburg for reading a draft of this article and offering several insights. 1 mSot5:5, the nonstandard vocalization follows Ms. Kaufmann. Ironically, the scribe origi- (?thereby negating the yearning where he meant to affirm it and (unwittingly ,לוא nally wrote underlining the very homophony upon which the text comments. The error was later discov- erased. The English translation offered here aims to capture a sense of the א ered and the ambiguity, at the price of diverging significantly from the original. 2 Standard translations of the text (JPS, SRSV) are used when there is general scholarly con- sensus on the translation of a verse. When scholarly consensus has not been reached or exist- ing translations require deeper inquiry, alternate translations will be proposed and explained, since these instances of non-consensus can indicate double-edged words at work. 3 Narrowly perceived, this category usually refers to Proverbs, Qohelet, Job, and some of the Psalms; more broadly, it includes narratives considered to be influenced by Wisdom circles, such as the Joseph narrative in Genesis. DOI 10.1515/9783110338799.47, © 2018 Naphtali Meshel, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 48 Naphtali Meshel ture more generally,4 and had been recognized and reflected upon already in antiquity.5 In this article it will be argued that a specific type of double entendre, namely double-edged wording – the formulation of two diametrically opposite expressions by means of a single phonetic and/or graphic sequence – is used systematically in key passages in the Book of Job; and that it couples with dramatic irony to serve as an organizing principle of the book, allowing for two simultaneous, incompatible readings to coexist – one from the limited per- spective of one or more of the characters; the other from the privileged perspec- tive of the reader. Recent scholarship on the Book of Job has highlighted the book’s poly- phonic character in the sense that it conveys a multiplicity of competing mes- sages,6 as well as its iconoclastic nature in the sense that it opposes classical 4 See Scott B. Noegel, ed., Puns and Pundits: Word Play in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Literature, CDL Press, Bethesda 2000; in that volume, see particularly Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, “Alliterative Allusions, Rebus Writing, and Paronomastic Punishment: Some Aspects of Word Play in Akkadian Literature,” 63–88. On Janus parallelism in the Book of Job, with additional examples from other ancient Near Eastern works of literature, see Scott B. Noegel, Janus Parallelism in the Book of Job, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield 1996. Seow’s study of the defective spelling in Job demonstrates that homography in pre-masoret- ic manuscripts of the Book of Job was even more widespread, allowing for a larger array of double entendres (e.g., nn. 15, 19); see Choon Leong Seow, “Orthography, Textual Criticism, and the Poetry of Job,” Journal of Biblical Literature 130.1 (2011), 63–85. Regarding the ques- tionable applicability of the category “Wisdom Literature” in Mesopotamian literature, see Vic- tor Avigdor Hurowitz, Proverbs, Am Oved and Magnes, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem 2012, 1.54–55. On the elaborate South Asian techniques of composing extended narratives that can be read consistently as relating two completely different stories, see Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, Columbia University Press, New York 2010. -, cf. the homo וֹאבוֹיּ ב See mSot5:5 cited in the epigraph; perhaps also b BB 16a infra (on 5 -that appears in 4QpalaeoJobc). The elaborate reversal of the hierarchies of know ביא graph ledge in the Greek Testament of Job, where Satan does not know that Job was told in advance that he will be subject to a trial, suggests that the authors were well aware of dramatic irony. For the text see Robert A. Kraft et al., eds., The Testament of Job. Scholars Press for the Society of Biblical Literature, Missoula 1974. 6 See for example Robert Gordis, The Book of Job: Commentary, New Translation, and Special Studies, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York 1978, 239; Yair Hoffman, A Blem- ished Perfection: The Book of Job in Context, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield 1996; Edward Greenstein, “In Job’s Face / Facing Job,” in: The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation, eds., Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer, and Erin Runions, Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta 1999, 301–317; Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imagi- nations, Oxford University Press, New York 2003; James L. Crenshaw, Reading Job: A Literary Whose Job Is This? Dramatic Irony and double entendre in the Book of Job 49 Wisdom Literature ideology with regards to the principles of divine righteous- ness and just reward.7 The present study builds upon this literature, but its thrust is different. First, while it acknowledges the existence of a spectrum of readings in the Book of Job, it focuses on two extremes of this spectrum, sug- gesting that two opposite readings are systematically present throughout the book. Second, while the claim offers a new literary reading of the Book of Job based on forms of irony that were not identified in the past or were identified only in passing, the claim is not limited to the hermeneutical potential of the text. Rather, this study also aims to offer criteria for the identification of inten- tional use of double-edged words, suggesting that in the Book of Job one en- counters a highly developed literary technique available in Wisdom circles.8 2 Double-Edged Words 2.1 Definition of a double-edged word Israelite Wisdom Literature was notorious already in antiquity for offering con- tradictory advice.9 A well-known example (not based on double-edged word- ing) is Proverbs 26:4–5: התאםגולהושתןפותלואכליסכןעתלא ויניעבםכחהיהיןפותלואכליסכהנע Do not respond to an idiot in accordance with his stupidity lest you, too, become just like him. Respond to an idiot in accordance with his stupidity lest he consider himself wise.10 Double-edged wording arises when two such expressions, rather than appear- ing in two consecutive utterances, are combined in a single phonetic (or graph- and Theological Commentary, Smyth and Helwys, Macon, 2011; and David Frankel, “The Image of God in the Book of Job,” Shnaton 22 (2013): 27–65. 7 See for example John Briggs Curtis, “On Job’s Response to Yahweh,” in: Journal of Biblical Literature 98. 4 (Dec. 1979): 497–511; Jack Miles, God: A Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1995; and Frankel, “The Image of God in the Book of Job.” 8 Contra the approach advocated by Yair Hoffman, who claimed that “[w]hether this use of equivocal words was premeditated or accidental is of minor consequence.” See Yair Hoffman, “The Use of Equivocal Words in the First Speech of Eliphaz,” in: Vetus Testamentum 30 (1980): 114–118. 9 See for example b Shab 30b. 10 Regardless of the various solutions offered for these verses (for example, Hurowitz, Prov- erbs, 2.510), the example illustrates what constitutes “diametrically opposite” advice. 50 Naphtali Meshel ic) sequence that is interpretable in two incompatible ways. Naturally, the two incompatible readings are rarely as neatly and completely diametrically op- posed as Proverbs 26:4–5. Double-edged wording is thus a subcategory of dou- ble entendre, and like other double entendres it can be crafted by means of a variety of techniques, such as lexical homophony and homography, syntactic ambiguity, and Janus-faced parallelism. In the Book of Job, it also takes the form of rhetorical questions with two opposite implied answers. 2.2 Double-edged words in context: Proverbs and Ahikar Let us turn to Proverbs 23:13, a verse that lends itself to two very different yet compatible readings. תומיאלטבשבונכתיכרסומרענמענמתלא Do not withhold chastisement from a boy; if you beat him with a sprig – he will not die (13a) At first glance, this statement appears to imply that: (1a) even if one beats one’s son, the son shall not die (in other words, a good beating never killed anyone). However, upon reading the second hemistich, “You should beat him with a ,( ליצתלואשמושפנוונכתטבשבהתא ,sprig – and save his life from Sheol” (13b one realizes that the first hemistich could actually imply quite the opposite of what was initially apparent: (1b) only if one beats one’s son, does one save him from (untimely) death. That is, a father who fails to chastise his son effectively leads the child to an untimely death, for in raising a rascal he will effectively set his son on the path of lawlessness and violence.11 The same duality is found in the Aramaic version of Ahikar from Elephan- tine:12 11 On “retrospective patterning” see Barbara Herrnstein, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1968, especially 10–14, 212.
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