ABSTRACT

TEXTS OF PROTEST: PERSPECTIVES ON SUFFERING IN THE AND THE POPOL VUH

The following comparative study analyzes various responses to the problem of suffering in ancient Israel and pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica as represented in the biblical Hebrew book of Job and the colonial K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh. Through the method of textual analysis, it identifies and explicates a number of distinct perspectives and examines the relationship between the experience of suffering and the creative project of -making through the construction, , and reconstruction of traditional narratives. In this context, it interprets myth as a hermeneutic for apprehending the meaning of suffering and proposes an understanding of literary composition as a means of reinterpreting and renegotiating mythic understandings of the past regarding the nature of the , the cosmos, and the , including such inevitable features of existence as and mortality. The study applies Paul Ricoeur’s typology of the “myths of the beginning and the end of ” in the Hebraic and Hellenic mythic traditions to the case of the Popol Vuh in an effort to develop the beginnings of an analogous understanding of the representations of suffering in Mesoamerican myth by determining points of correspondence to as well as divergence from this Ricoeurian typology. Finally, it interprets both texts as forms of protest against ideologies deemed oppressive by their respective authors. Thus, it examines how these authors are reacting to their respective cultural-historical contexts and generating meaning through narrative in response to historical experiences of acute suffering.

Nicholas Jared Andrews May 2013

TEXTS OF PROTEST: PERSPECTIVES ON SUFFERING IN THE BOOK OF JOB AND THE POPOL VUH

by Nicholas Jared Andrews

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2013 APPROVED For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Nicholas Jared Andrews Thesis Author

Steve Adisasmito-Smith (Chair) English

Ruth Jenkins English

Robert Maldonado

Keith Jordan Art and Design

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I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

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Signature of thesis author: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to all who have provided encouragement and support during the course of this endeavor, in particular my mother, my father, my beautiful girlfriend, close friends, and the following California State University, Fresno, faculty: Dr. Steve Adisasmito-Smith, Dr. Ruth Jenkins, Dr. Robert Maldonado, and Dr. Keith Jordan. I extend my sincerest gratitude to these professors for their dedication and integrity, for sharing their knowledge and passion with students such as myself, for encouragement and support throughout my academic career, and, perhaps most of all, for their friendship. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from these remarkable individuals, and I hope that I have managed to glean a bit of their knowledge during the time that I have spent in their classrooms and in their company. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – DOLEO ERGO SUM: EVIL, SUFFERING, AND THE DESIRE FOR MEANING ...... 1

The ...... 1

The Problem of Suffering ...... 12

Myth and Meaning ...... 14

Methodology and Significance ...... 19 CHAPTER 2 – INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF JOB: BACKGROUND AND CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT ...... 24 CHAPTER 3 – THE BOOK OF JOB: THE RETRIBUTIVE VIEW OF SUFFERING AND ITS REFUTATION ...... 54

The Prose Narrative Framework: Suffering as a Test of ...... 58

The Poetic Debate: Suffering as Divine Injustice ...... 64 The : The Cosmocentric Perspective and the Mystery of Suffering ...... 84

Conclusions ...... 90 CHAPTER 4 – INTRODUCTION TO THE POPOL VUH: BACKGROUND AND CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT ...... 94 CHAPTER 5 – THE POPOL VUH: RITUAL SACRIFICE AND THE REGENERATIVE VIEW OF SUFFERING ...... 118

The Creation: Suffering for a Greater Good ...... 119

The Fall of Vucub Caquix: The Return of the Retributive View ...... 126

The Defeat of the Death Lords: Suffering as Cosmic Conflict ...... 129

Conclusions ...... 135 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION – THE BOOK OF JOB AND THE POPOL VUH: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS ...... 137

The “Symbolism of Evil” ...... 137

“Evil” in Ancient Israel and Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica ...... 139 vi vi Page

Theological Views ...... 147

Anthropological Views ...... 153

Texts of Protest: A Departure and a Return ...... 156

The Problem of Suffering in Modern Thought ...... 159

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study ...... 164

WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED ...... 166

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – DOLEO ERGO SUM: EVIL, SUFFERING, AND THE DESIRE FOR MEANING

The Problem of Evil Throughout much of the history of “western” civilization, philosophical discourse regarding the experience of suffering has been dominated by a discursive formation that has come to be known as the “problem of evil,” an ongoing dialectic in the fields of Christian and the philosophy of . Due to the prominent influence of Christian thought among the ideologies of the West since the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine (r. 306 – 337 CE), who made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman empire, this discourse has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of the metaphysical and theological claims of the Christian tradition, which considers to be the (“highest good”). As Joseph F. Kelly notes, “much of the difficulty about evil derives from , in one God, often a good and powerful who theoretically can stop evil but practically does not” (5). As Kelly here implies, evil presents no logical dilemma for traditional polytheistic belief systems, which account for the of evil by the existence of multiple , each with their own distinct domain of activity. Furthermore, such polytheistic divinities are not typically held to be necessarily benevolent or absolutely powerful. As in the myths of the ancient Greeks, for example, human beings are often unfortunate pawns in the disputes of anthropomorphic gods who inflict suffering out of anger or jealousy. Monotheism, on the hand, cannot account for the existence of evil by either divine plurality or impotence if it posits an omnipotent deity. Thus, in its logical form (as opposed to its evidential form), the problem of evil emerges from the acceptance of four propositions traditionally associated with the monotheistic “Abrahamic” : , Christianity, 2 2 and Islam. Therefore, it may be construed as a logical problem with four premises, though many variants omit the first premise, deeming it superfluous. These premises are as follows: (1) God is omniscient (all-knowing), (2) God is omnipotent (all-powerful), (3) God is omnibenevolent (all-good), and (4) Evil (or, more precisely, suffering) exists. As emphasized by J. L. Mackie, the above premises, if all accepted as viable truth claims, appear to present a logical contradiction, a point reiterated by numerous philosophers and theologians. The of this argument, in correspondence with the above premises, is roughly as follows: (1) If God is omniscient and evil exists, then it logically follows that he knows all things (past, present, and future), including every instance of evil or suffering that ever has occurred or ever will occur; (2) If God is omnipotent and evil exists, then it logically follows that he either causes evil or permits evil (as he does in the biblical book of Job). In either case, he cannot be absolved of ethical accountability, since he possesses the power to prevent evil, and therefore cannot be deemed omnibenevolent, since his causation or allowance of evil would seem to negate this possibility; (3) On the other hand, if God is indeed omnibenevolent and evil exists, then it logically follows that he is powerless to prevent it and therefore, by definition, is not omnipotent. Unless, of course, he has some justifiable reason for allowing such evil to exist, though it is difficult to imagine what could possibly justify the degree and overwhelming prevalence of evil and suffering in the world. Indeed, as even C. S. Lewis (a famed Christian apologist and author of the Chronicles of Narnia series) admits, the vast emptiness of the “completely dark and unimaginably cold” cosmos, the predatory natural order of biological existence, the inevitable physical pain that arises as a consequence of corporeality, the acute mental suffering made possible by the evolution of 3 3 , the entirety of human history (“a record of crime, war, disease, and terror”), the “agonized apprehension” of loss and the “poignant misery” of memory, the inevitable ruin of civilizations, and the entropy of the universe itself all seem to indicate, and thus might reasonably lead one to conclude, that “either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to , or else an evil spirit” (1-3). Despite this abundance of evidence, however, Lewis, like countless others before and since, remained unconvinced, for reasons discussed below. This logical problem was perhaps most definitively articulated by (1711 – 1776 CE) in a series of “old questions” that he attributes to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE): “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” (pt. X, p. 63). John Hick has formulated the problem in similar terms: “If God is perfectly good, He must want to abolish all evil; if He is unlimitedly powerful, He must be able to abolish all evil; but evil exists; therefore, either God is not perfectly good or He is not unlimitedly powerful” (5). Lewis has chosen to formulate the problem in the inverse, emphasizing the absence of perfect happiness rather than the presence of evil or suffering: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore, God lacks either goodness or power, or both” (14). David Parkin has encapsulated the problem in a single question: “If God is benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, then why does he permit the existence of evil” (21). Finally, in what is perhaps its most succinct articulation, Harold S. Kushner has distilled the problem yet further, refining it to what is arguably its utmost : “Why do bad things happen to 4 4 good people?” Such arguments, referred to as “arguments from evil,” have been divided by scholars into two types: (1) the “logical problem of evil,” which concerns the logical incompatibility of the existence of evil with the aforementioned theological claims; and (2) the “evidential problem of evil,” which concerns the apparent improbability of the based upon the empirical evidence of evil in the world. In other words, the former concerns the logical possibility of the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god, given the existence of evil, while the latter concerns the improbability of the existence of such a god, given the existence of evil. In response to these problems, Christian apologists throughout the ages have produced, and continue to produce, increasingly elaborate arguments in defense of the doctrine of divine justice. Since the twentieth century, these arguments, referred to as “,” have been classified under the rubric of two distinct types. The first, which Hick has called “the predominant of western Christendom,” is known as the “” or “ defense,” first proposed by (354 – 430 CE) in his Confessiones and later associated with Alvin Platinga in modern discourse (215). The second, Hick has identified as the “” or “-making defense,” developed by Hick himself based upon the writings of Irenaeus (130 – 202 CE), an early Church Father and theologian who proposed a two-stage process of human creation and development requiring free will and the existence of evil for the spiritual maturation of the individual human soul in preparation for its ascent to . This latter approach is essentially the argument made by Lewis as well, in his book The Problem of Pain (1940), in which he describes suffering as the chisel that the divine sculptor uses to “remake” and “perfect” human beings, “to compel us into unity . . . by persecution and even hardship” (35). However, 5 5

Lewis would later find this perspective challenged, and his faith shaken, by the tragic loss of his wife to cancer, an experience that caused him to reconsider his prior interpretation of suffering, as recorded in A Grief Observed (1961). The Irenaean theodicy can be understood as a specific subtype of the more general “greater good defense,” employed by Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274 CE) in his Summa Theologiae, which suggests that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god either causes or permits evil in the service of a hypothetical “greater good” by which the entire history of evil and suffering will eventually be justified (a suggestion offensive to modern sensibilities when considered in the light of such horrendous atrocities as the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and children during the Holocaust or the horrific deaths of thousands of children daily due to starvation, malaria, or complications from the HIV/AIDS virus, for example). To this effect, Aquinas writes, “God allows to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom” (pt. III, q. 1, art. 3, p. 13). In its traditional form, this view interprets the biblical myth of “” (as it has come to be called in the Christian tradition) found in Genesis 2.4b – 3.24 as a felix culpa (meaning “happy fault” or, in the Catholic tradition, “fortunate fall”), a phrase derived from the writings of Augustine. According to this view, the Fall was ultimately a “fortunate” because it made possible the redemption of humanity through the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ on the cross for the expiation of “original ” engendered by the disobedience of the primordial human couple. Thus, in Augustine’s estimation, evil exists because “He [God] deemed it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist at all” (ch. VIII, par. 27, p. 35). Furthermore, Augustine understood evil to be nothing more than the “privation of good” (Latin: privatio boni), as darkness is merely the absence of light, rather than a thing unto itself with its own independent existence (ch. III, par. 11, p. 18). To 6 6 this effect, he writes, “to lessen the good is to give rise to evil” (ch. IV, par. 12, p. 19). Therefore, he reasons, “There can never be evil where there is no good,” and “every being therefore is good” (ch. IV, par. 13, p. 20). Some proponents of the greater good defense have argued that free will constitutes a greater good that justifies the existence of suffering. According to this view, God’s allowance of evil is a necessary condition of free will, for human freedom cannot exist without the possibility for moral evil. Thus, this view places the burden of evil squarely on the shoulders of human beings, thereby combining the two types of defense (free will and greater good) into a single theodicy that effectively absolves God of responsibility for all sufferings produced by human beings, though it neglects to address and cannot account for non-human causes of suffering, such as disease, natural disasters, and mortality itself. Other notable thinkers who have employed variations of these arguments include (480 – 524/6 CE), in his De Consolatione Philosophiae, and John Milton (1608 – 1674 CE), in his masterpiece of epic poetry Paradise Lost, the explicit purpose of which (according to the text itself) is “to justify the ways of God to men” (I.26). Despite his efforts, however, Milton arguably succeeded in accomplishing the opposite due to his vividly imagined depiction of as a complex, introspective anti-hero and impassioned orator who rallies a third of the angels of heaven to revolt in protest against the dictates of a totalitarian god, leading William Blake to comment that Milton was “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (71). For this reason, Milton’s Satan was adopted by the Romantics as a heroic, rather than a villainous, figure. In 1710, German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716 CE) published a collection of essays on “the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of evil,” in which he coined the term “theodicy,” meaning “divine justice” (from 7 7 the Greek ϑεóς, meaning “god,” and δίκη, meaning “justice”). In these Essais de Théodicée, Leibniz expounded a philosophical argument in response to the problem of evil. This philosophy, known as optimism (from the Latin optimum, meaning “best”), acknowledges the inherent imperfection of the world but asserts that, despite this fact, it remains the “best of all possible worlds.” This claim was famously satirized by Voltaire (1694 – 1778 CE) in his novella Candide, ou l’Optimisme, which dramatizes the gradual disillusionment of its naïve, eponymous protagonist as he is forced to confront the imperfection of the world through a series of increasingly fantastical hardships. Similarly, another French novella also produced during the Enlightenment, titled Justine and authored by the infamous (1740 – 1814 CE), vividly illustrated the “misfortunes of virtue” in what seems to be the worst of all possible worlds, expounding his own libertine philosophy in the process through the philosophical musings of the novella’s many villains. Since the publication of Leibniz’s writings on the problem, the term “theodicy” has come to denote any argument that attempts to reconcile the doctrines of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and with the existence of evil, though since the early twentieth century its meaning has been expanded (by sociologist Max Weber and others) to apply to any attempt to explain the existence of evil or to account for its origin, whether formulated within or outside of the framework of . This expansion of the term has enabled its application to non-western belief systems, effectively broadening the discussion by allowing for the inclusion of such belief systems in an emergent cross-cultural and pan-historical discourse on the various representations and understandings of the related phenomena of evil and suffering in the diverse traditions of human history. Though at times a useful term, the word “evil,” 8 8 remains problematic for a number of reasons, however, and should thus be employed with caution. First, it is a heavily loaded term that connotes certain culturally specific metaphysical and theological associations that are not universally applicable, though they are certainly widespread, both historically and geographically. The term “evil” is most often used to describe human causes of suffering, though its actual referent in such cases is typically human cruelty or sadism rather than a hypothetical, metaphysical force that is operant in the world. Natural causes of suffering (such as disease, drought, earthquakes, famine, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other such occurrences) cannot rightly be called “evil,” for they are merely consequences of the physical laws of nature and thus lack intent. The term “evil,” then, may be defined, and distinguished from suffering, by the following conditions: Evil is the willful infliction of suffering, while suffering is the effect of an “evil” committed. According to this definition, the infliction of suffering, in order for it justifiably to be termed “evil,” requires intent. Suffering, on the other hand, is an effect experienced and may thus manifest regardless of causality or intentionality. Similarly, Morton writes, “Evil centers on atrocity: death, pain, and humiliation imposed on others. Evil acts produce atrocities deliberately, and with a specific kind of deliberation, in which evil-doers look away from the fact that the victims are fellow human beings” (13, emphasis added). Jeffrey Burton Russell has also defined evil in similar terms, stating that “the essence of evil is abuse of a sentient being, a being that can feel pain. It is the pain that matters. Evil is grasped by the mind immediately and immediately felt by the emotions; it is sensed as hurt deliberately inflicted” (17, emphasis added). In response, Kelly has distilled this definition to the following formulation: “the deliberate imposition of suffering by 9 9 a human being upon another sentient being,” which is as precise a definition of evil as any (3). It is important to note that the operative factor in all of the above definitions is deliberation or intent. To these definitions, all of which are suitable, let us add simply “the willful infliction of suffering,” which is perhaps the most succinct possible formulation. Second, the term “evil” signifies incomprehensibility and thus halts attempts at understanding, often before they have begun. As notes, calling an action “evil” implies that it is “beyond comprehension,” for “evil is unintelligible” and “there is no context which would make it explicable” (2-3). Similarly, in Morton’s estimation, “‘Evil’ is part of the vocabulary of hatred, dismissal, or incomprehension. We call acts or people evil when they are so bad that we cannot fit them within our normal moral and explanatory frames.” Thus, “our horror drives us to a special terminology” (4). Later, he adds, “we very often react to evil as if it were mysterious and inexplicable. We can’t imagine how anyone like us could do anything like that” (21). For this reason, the term “evil” has the potential to stifle productive conversation. It often appears as the verbal equivalent of throwing one’s hands up in acquiescence to incomprehensibility, thus providing no useful solutions. According to Morton, “We find the origins of atrocity so puzzling that we label the mystery Evil, and we grope desperately for explanations for it” (2). What is needed in such circumstances is a demythologization of evil, for it is only by attempting to understand the various neurological, psychological, and sociological factors that have led to an act of “evil” that a humane society can hope to prevent similar crimes in the future. To this effect, Morton theorizes, “Instead of depicting the motives of evil-doers as unintelligible, an enlightening theory of evil should help us to understand the variety of motives for performing evil actions, and the varied resemblances these 10 10 motives have to those that operate in normal human life.” In other words, “it should expand our resources for understanding” rather than diminish them by resorting to superstitious, medieval thinking that relies upon mythological constructs such as demonic possession, the Devil, or the concept of original sin (7). Third, and perhaps most insidious of all, concerns the employment of supernatural claims as explanations for human evil, such as demonic possession or voices from God. These “devil made me do it” or “God told me to” explanations reflect, at best, a need for mental health intervention and, at worst, an attempt to evade ethical accountability and responsibility for one’s actions. Furthermore, they are dangerous. As Morton rightly notes, “Though there are no devils, people’s beliefs in devils can be a powerful force for evil” (33). Thus, the term itself bears the dangerous potential to produce the very types of atrocities that it seeks to condemn, through the demonization (i.e., dehumanization) and “othering” of those labeled “evil” and the fostering of the kind of “virtuous paranoia” that inspires “protective or pre-emptive atrocities,” such as those seen, for example, during the witch-hunts, tortures, and executions conducted in western Europe and later in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, to cite but one particularly infamous example of many (Morton 5).1 As Morton explains, “Thinking in terms of evil can give us the same attitudes as evil-doers. They often think their victims deserve what they get, that they are worthless scum, inferior beings, or dangerously alien. They often think, in fact, that their victims are evil.” Therefore, he cautions, “Thinking in terms of evil can, if we are not careful, make us accomplices in atrocity” (6).

1 See the notorious Malleus Maleficarum for an example of the misogynistic logic that was used to justify these persecutions (Mackay). 11 11

Finally, the idea of human evil presents a logical chicken-and-egg problem that implies circular reasoning: Do human beings commit evil acts because they are evil? Or are they evil because they commit evil acts? On the other hand, as Susan Heiman notes, the term “evil” can be useful because it is indicative of the human desire for clear moral distinctions, even while its ambiguity and lack of definition renders it susceptible to the dangers of distortion and manipulation for political ends (xiv). Consider, for example, the Bush Administration’s use of the term “Axis of Evil” following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a calculated rhetorical strategy aimed at demonizing foreign nations considered enemies while rallying the American public into compliance with a political agenda in the guise of a global “War on Terror.” The present study will examine the problem in more general terms, divorcing it from the metaphysical and theological associations that the term “evil” connotes (the apt reason for this study) and instead shifting its focus to the experience of suffering, which is perhaps its true root. By this, I mean to suggest that the phenomenon of suffering begets the concept of evil, which is retroactively postulated as its source. In other words, evil (as a metaphysical construct) is conceived in response to the experience of suffering, as a means to account for and make sense of this troubling phenomenon. As Parkin rightly points out, “Evil is not anything: it denotes rather an area of discourse concerning human suffering, human existential predicaments, and the attempted resolution of these through other humans and through non-human agencies, including a God or gods” (10-11, emphasis in original). Thus, the problem of evil, in its most fundamental form, is more precisely a problem of suffering. This simple fact reveals the universality of the problem, for “suffering may be culturally defined, but it is never lacking,” and “the predicaments are therefore many” (23). In responding to this most 12 12 fundamental of human problems, Parkin notes, “people reveal their cultural assumptions about being, fallibility, and culpability” (23). There is, therefore, much to be learned by employing the problem of suffering as an analytical framework for cross-cultural comparison, insofar as it can reveal a great deal about a particular culture’s ideas and values regarding humanity’s most fundamental concerns and its most perplexing and troubling questions. Furthermore, such comparative inquiry increases our perspectives and broadens our understanding of humanity’s remarkable creative capacity for meaning- making in the face of complex problems.

The Problem of Suffering Suffering is an inevitable condition of human existence. As has long acknowledged, living necessarily involves the experience of pain, both physical and emotional, though the experience of each individual remains unique. Thus, suffering is at once both a deeply personal (and often alienating) experience and a universal human phenomenon capable of uniting people en masse, whether in solidarity created through common suffering or in alliance against the suffering of others. Due to its universal nature, suffering is also a fundamental component of human identity; part of what it means to be human is to experience pain, and to overcome the challenges and hardships that human life entails, which in turn shapes our understanding of ourselves and of our relationship to the world in which we live. As Eagleton notes, “There are certain negative features of the human species which cannot be greatly altered. As long as there is love and death, for example, the tragedy of mourning those dear to us who perish will know no end” (37). Human beings, therefore, are creatures that love and creatures that die (in contrast to the immortal gods), creatures that hope and 13 13 fear, laugh and weep, struggle and endure, creatures that suffer. Thus, suffering, like mortality and the ability to feel love, is an essential feature of the human condition. In some cases, the experience of suffering can provide opportunities for learning and growth, an observation that recalls the Irenaean theodicy as well as ’s oft-quoted aphorism, “What does not kill me makes me stronger” (33). In other cases, however, the experience of suffering is so acute that it suffocates the soul, crushing the spirit and depriving the sufferer of the will to live. Often, suffering is the result of human causes, which theologians call “moral evil” (as distinguished from suffering produced by non-human causes, termed “”).2 Such human causes bring to mind the Augustinian theodicy and can thus be explained in terms of free will. In other cases, however, suffering occurs senselessly, resulting from indiscriminate chance occurrences that are beyond human ability to predict or control. What meaning, if any, can be derived from such perplexing cases of senseless suffering? According to Dorothee Soelle, the value of personal suffering lies precisely in its ability to “make one more sensitive to the suffering in the world,” to increase one’s capacity for compassion (125). In this way, Soelle argues, suffering “can teach us to put forth a greater love for everything that exists” because “the capacity for love is strongest when it grows out of suffering,” a view that is reminiscent of the Irenaean theodicy, though it is here construed in secular terms (125, 126-7). Thus, according to Soelle, the experience of suffering is capable of countering societal apathy, a word that literally signifies an insensibility to suffering (from the Greek α + παϑος, meaning “without emotion, feeling, or

2 Parkin delineates three distinct categories of evil: “the moral, referring to human culpability; the physical, by which is understood destructive elemental forces of nature, for example earthquakes, storms, or ; and the metaphysical, by which disorder in the cosmos or in relations with results from a conflict of principles or wills” (15). 14 14 suffering”). In Soelle’s view, “the ideal of a life free from suffering, the illusion of painlessness, destroys people’s ability to feel anything” (4). Therefore, “only those who themselves are suffering will work for the abolition of conditions under which people are exposed to senseless, patently unnecessary suffering, such as hunger, oppression, or torture” (2-3). Most importantly, Soelle asserts, “God has no other hands than ours,” and it is thus up to human beings, in the absence of divine intervention, to embody the power of the so-called “God of love” (i.e., the Christian god) through compassion and humanist activism (149). Implicit in Soelle’s analysis are two fundamental concerns. The more urgent concern plaguing the sufferer is undoubtedly the question of how to alleviate his or her suffering. Arguably the more significant concern, however, is the question of meaning.

Myth and Meaning In Viktor Frankl’s estimation, “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life,” contrary to the “pleasure principle” of Freudian psychoanalysis (113). According to Frankl’s psychotherapeutic theory, called “logotherapy” (from the Greek λóγος, a polyvalent word signifying, among other things, “meaning”), the process of “striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man” (99). He calls this striving “the will to meaning,” in contrast with Schopenhauer’s will to live, Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s will to pleasure, and Foucault’s will to knowledge. “That is why man is even ready to suffer,” Frankl writes, “on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning” (113). Frankl’s analysis here echoes Nietzsche’s maxim, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” an assertion that testifies to the enduring strength of the human will 15 15

(33). It is also apparent that he who has a why to die for can bear almost any how, as evidenced by the willingness (even eagerness, in some cases) of martyrs to endure torture and death for their convictions (whether religious beliefs or socio- political ideals), mothers to sacrifice themselves for their children, and lovers to endure the same for their beloveds. Frankl’s assessment has been independently maintained by Peter L. Berger, who writes, “And it is probable . . . that, in situations of acute suffering, the need for meaning is as strong as or even stronger than the need for happiness,” for the apprehension of meaning makes suffering more tolerable by strengthening the resolve of the sufferer (58). Furthermore, Berger rightly sees meaning-making as the primary function of theodicy: “It is not happiness that theodicy primarily provides, but meaning,” he notes (58). Indeed, it is in part this struggle to make sense of suffering that underlies the enterprise of religion and the sacred narratives that lie at its core, which Soelle has described as an elaborate “bundle of defense mechanisms against disappointment,” a reductive definition to be sure, but one that acknowledges a fundamental function of religious narrative (147). Thus, religion and its mythic content may be understood, in one sense, as a creative response to suffering that generates meaning. This approach to the study of scripture (sacred texts) is capable of providing unique insights into the representations of suffering that appear in various cultural artifacts, such as myths and literature. Here, it is important to note the relationship between these two categories, for they are not mutually exclusive. By definition, myths (traditionally an oral form of meaning-making among non- literate cultures) become literature (and yet remain myths) at the moment that they are written down. In many respects, literature has been an heir to myth, an alternative medium for the creation of new myths made possible by the invention 16 16 of a new technology (writing), and yet the literary imagination has also been a tool for the preservation and reinterpretation of the myths of the past, as evidenced, for example, by the book of Job.3 Due to the universal nature of suffering, as well as the significance of its role in the project of meaning-making, this troubling phenomenon has been a subject of major concern for artists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and theologians alike throughout the ages. One of the ways in which human responses to suffering manifest is in the construction of belief systems (studied under the rubric of religion) and the mythic structures that support them. Each of these belief systems provides its adherents with a comprehensive worldview (from the German term Weltanshauung), a hermeneutic for apprehending the nature of the cosmos, the divine, and the self. Such worldviews offer an interpretation of existence and provide a framework that enables their adherents to orient themselves in time and space, “to ‘locate’ human phenomena within a cosmic frame of reference” (Berger 35). Such belief systems, which Berger calls “nomoi” (from the Greek νóμος, meaning “law,” “custom,” or “order”), “locate the individual’s life in an all- embracing fabric of meanings that, by its very nature, transcends that life,” such that “the individual who internalizes these meanings at the same time transcends himself” (54). These belief systems contribute to the construction of individual identity while simultaneously enabling the of individuality through the formation of collective identity, for “the world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise” (Berger 7). This collectivity in turn promotes solidarity and thus strengthens the social fabric of the community. Furthermore, and of paramount significance for the present study, such belief

3 See chapters 2 and 3. 17 17 systems provide a means of comprehending by generating meaning in response to such troubling phenomena as suffering and death, for “every nomos is an area of meaning carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of lucidity in a formless, dark, always ominous jungle” (Berger 23). Thus, Berger conceives of religion as a product of man’s “self- externalization, of his infusion of reality with his own meanings” (28). Religion, he explains, “implies that human order is projected into the totality of being” (28). It is “the audacious attempt to conceive of the universe as being humanly significant,” and therefore constitutes “the ‘sacred canopy’ which every human society builds over its world to give it meaning” (28). A part of this projection of human order and significance onto the cosmos is an attempt to understand the experience of senseless suffering as meaningful and purposive, to bestow sense upon and assign a teleology to an otherwise perplexing phenomenon. It is in this manner that the enterprise of religion, and its symbolic language of myth (Greek: μυϑος), addresses the most fundamental concerns of humanity: suffering, death, and the question of meaning. Mythopoesis (myth-making), then, serves a logopoetic (meaning-making) function, by which human beings make sense of these concerns and generate meaning in response to them. Therefore, the human desire for meaning may be understood as the impetus for mythopoesis. In other words, the natural human propensity for meaning-making constitutes the “mythopoetic nucleus” (to borrow a phrase from Paul Ricoeur) that lies at the heart of the world of myth, pumping blood to its innumerable appendages and infusing them with life. As a method of interpretation, reframing the problem of evil as a problem of suffering sheds new light on sacred narratives that attempt to explain evil, a prevalent theme in world mythology, undoubtedly due to the fact that the 18 18 experience of suffering is a universal phenomenon. For example, a myth of the origin of evil, such as the biblical Fall (a myth-type that Ricoeur calls the “Adamic” myth, from the Hebrew noun ’āḏām, a title referring to the primordial human ancestor), is more precisely a myth of the entrance of suffering and hardship into a previously utopian existence that is simultaneously a “good place” (Greek: εὖ + τόπος) and “no place” (Greek: οὐ + τόπος). Likewise, an apocalyptic myth of the end of evil (the Adamic myth in reverse) constitutes an eschatological destruction or exile of evil from the world and thus an end to the suffering experienced within that world. In the context of the apocalyptic , this destruction or exile effectively restores the cosmos to its former pristine state in the absence of suffering. The former myth-type (the Adamic myth) looks back, from the midst of suffering in the present time, to a mythical utopian past, while the latter (the apocalyptic myth-type) projects that desire (the alleviation of suffering) forward in time, envisioning a mythical utopian future free from suffering and death. Together, these two myth-types offer an explanation for the existence of evil as well as hope for its eventual end at the eschaton. These mythic understandings are representative of but one of numerous systems of thought conceived in response to the universal problem of suffering. The study ahead investigates two other such belief systems (those found among the peoples of ancient Israel and pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, respectively) in an attempt to determine the unique responses developed by the cultures that produced them as well as the distinct meanings that these responses derive from the experience of suffering. 19 19 Methodology and Significance It is in the above terms that the present study will examine, through the methods of textual analysis, various responses to the problem of suffering among the mythic narratives of these cultures, all of which evidence the aforementioned process of logopoesis. In addition, the study will attempt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon extra-textual evidence from such disciplines as archaeology, art history, and comparative religion where applicable. The study takes as its primary sources two historically significant literary works from contexts far removed, both geographically and temporally: the biblical Hebrew book of Job and the colonial K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh. These texts vividly confront the problem of suffering and the question of meaning with fruitful results, offering valuable insight into the differing perspectives of these unique cultural traditions. The book of Job, a meditation on unjust suffering and exploitative power, is an especially valuable text for any discussion of the historical “solutions” to the problem of suffering because it contains multiple responses to this problem and engages these differing perspectives in an argumentative poetic dialogue of competing ideologies that illustrates both the complexity of the problem and its relevance to the lives of actual human beings by presenting an example of unjust suffering in the case of Job. Furthermore, and most significantly, the text is an exemplary document in the history of the problem of suffering insofar as it evidences a shift in thinking by presenting a powerful critique of traditional responses to the problem and by opening up the discussion to a plurality of interpretive possibilities through the exploration of new, alternative “solutions.” In the process of this extraordinary critique, Job questions neither the existence nor the omnipotence of God. Instead, he stages a protest on moral grounds, heretically 20 20 refuting the traditional claims of divine and justice in a series of impassioned monologues. In response to Job’s indictment, YHWH (the theonym of the god of the Israelites, conventionally pronounced , though the original Hebrew pronunciation and meaning of this name are uncertain)4 presents a surprisingly modern perspective that further contradicts the traditional view espoused by Job’s “friends,” who infer the presence of guilt from Job’s misfortune based upon their refusal to question the doctrine of divine justice (the understanding that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked). Thus, the text constitutes a useful entry-point into the discussion because it simultaneously engages both traditional “orthodox” views and dissenting “heterodox” views, preserving within its verses the unraveling of the moral vision of the cosmos, a paradigm-shifting development in the history of western thought. It is for this reason that Bruce Zuckerman has referred to the text as a case of “historical counterpoint,” while William Safire has called Job “the first dissident” and the text itself “the first authorized challenge to Authority” (88). The claim that the text records a pivotal event in the history of the western discourse on suffering is not intended to imply that Job was the singular voice that affected this development. It is indeed in Job, however, that this historical “moment” finds its most exemplary expression concretized and crystallized in textual form, a literary fossil preserved in the archaeological record of the . In the following chapters, the book of Job is contrasted with the Popol Vuh, a colonial Maya text selected for inclusion in the present study as a means of entry into an original investigation of the problem of suffering as represented in the literatures of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerica, as compared to and

4 See van der Toorn. 21 21 contrasted with traditional western responses to the problem. For the purposes of the present study, and due to its limitations by constraints both temporal and spatial, the Popol Vuh is herein analyzed as a representative document of the larger cultural traditions of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, a heretofore largely neglected area of study in the context of the problem of suffering. While the text is held to be an exemplar of certain pan-Mesoamerican cultural traditions and ideological principles, it is included herein with the understanding that, while the K’iche’ shared many cultural beliefs and practices with other neighboring Mesoamerican peoples (both contemporary and antecedent), each of these cultures was distinct and unique. Therefore, care must be exercised to avoid of the diversity of individual Mesoamerican civilizations and the uniqueness of their cultural output. Neither the extant literatures of either colonial or pre-colonial Mesoamerica have yet been brought to bear upon the cross-cultural and pan- historical dialectic of the problem of suffering. For this reason, the study aims to identify and elucidate the various responses to this universal problem that are suggested by the pre-Hispanic myths preserved within the Popol Vuh. Chapter 2 offers an introduction to the book of Job, discussing the cultural- historical context out of which the text has emerged as well as the hermeneutical problems that it presents for the astute reader. Especially significant cultural- historical developments for the study of Job include (1) the metaphysical and theological claims of the Hebrew wisdom tradition, which constitute the dominant worldview of the Hebrew , and (2) the Exilic Period of biblical history, a time of acute suffering (and, one imagines, a corresponding period of critical questioning of traditional theological understandings) among the peoples of ancient Israel. Chapter 3 provides a corresponding textual analysis of Job that aims to identify and contextualize the various perspectives on suffering contained 22 22 therein, and to suggest a particular interpretation of the ambiguity of the text. Chapter 4, like chapter 2, offers an introduction to the Popol Vuh, its cultural- historical context, and its hermeneutical problems. Chapter 5 presents a textual analysis of the Popol Vuh in light of the understandings developed in the preceding chapter and attempts to derive from the discussion an overarching pre- Hispanic view of suffering that may provide a working theoretical framework for further study of the problem in the context of the cultures of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. Chapter 6 consists of a comparative analysis of the various responses to the problem in both Job and the Popol Vuh, an approach intended to highlight the commonalities as well as underscore the distinctions between the differing perspectives suggested by the two texts, as determined by the individual analyses of each in chapters 3 and 5 respectively. Chapter 6 concludes with an interpretation of both works as texts of protest that constitute a creative means of liberation from oppression in response to the respective cultural-historical contexts out of which they emerged, followed by a brief discussion of the limitations of the study and suggestions for further research. The problem of suffering is complex and multi-faceted, one that offers no simple solutions, as evidenced by the multiplicity of responses to it. The questions of why suffering exists, how suffering can be alleviated, and what, if any, meaning may be derived from the experience of suffering are all fundamental human concerns that are worthy of attention. On the one hand, it is important to speak scientifically, in objective terms, about the empirical causes of suffering (whether physiological, psychological, social, or political) in order to attempt their alleviation and prevention. On the other hand, it is equally valuable to speak in subjective terms about the experience of suffering as well as various historical, philosophical, and theological responses to the problem in all of its myriad forms 23 23 and manifestations. Unlike the former category, the latter addresses the question of meaning and attempts to understand suffering in ontological and phenomenological terms. The present study aims to draw upon the language and ideas of both categories in its methodology in hopes of addressing the problem with the of the scientist as well as the sensitivity of the caregiver. The task ahead is, of necessity, an intellectual pursuit concerned with the problem of suffering generally (i.e., as an abstract concept), but in undertaking such an endeavor it is important not to lose sight of the reality of suffering in the world and the ways in which it affects the lives of individual human beings, each with their own dreams and frustrations, hopes and fears. It is the sincere hope of the author that this study will provide a useful entry-point into the problem of suffering and elucidate for the reader the various pre-modern perspectives preserved within the texts in discussion. In doing so, the study aims to cultivate a deeper understanding of these dynamic cultures and to promote an appreciation of the complexity and cross-cultural significance of this most fundamental and timeless of human concerns, the universal plight of Homo patiens, the “suffering man.”

CHAPTER 2 – INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF JOB: BACKGROUND AND CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The book of Job (Hebrew: ’iyyôb) is one of many books contained within the canon of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian “,” called the Tanakh in Judaism), a compilation of texts of various genres that are regarded as holy writ in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. The Hebrew Bible familiar to modern readers is divided into three parts: the (“Teaching” or “Instruction”), the Nevi’im or Nebi’im (“Prophets”), and the Ketuvim or Ketubim (“Writings”), from which the moniker Tanakh (based on an acronym formed from the initial letters of each section: TNK) is derived. Job is located in the third section, which contains the “Poetical and Wisdom Books” (Brettler 721). Along with the books of Proverbs and Qoheleth (commonly known by the title Ecclesiastes, derived from the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible), Job is regarded as belonging to the corpus of ancient Hebrew “wisdom literature,” a genre that addresses universal human concerns in an attempt to understand the world, the place and purpose of human beings within the world, and the relationship of human beings to God. Not unlike the “deeply skeptical” Qoheleth (Hebrew: qōheleṯ, meaning “Teacher” or “Gatherer”), which likens the pursuit of wisdom to the futile “chasing of wind,” Job may be said to represent a kind of “anti-wisdom” literature because both texts call into question and challenge the conventional views of the Hebrew wisdom tradition, exemplified by the book of Proverbs as well as certain of the Psalms, sometimes called “wisdom psalms” (Seow 721). Among these conventional views is the belief that suffering is visited upon human beings as a just punishment from God. J. Christiaan Beker explains that this retributive perspective is a central feature of “Deuteronomic theology” (or 25 25

“Deuteronomistic theology,” as it is often called) the theology espoused by the Deuteronomistic historian believed by scholars to be largely responsible for the composition or redaction of the historical narratives of the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings (31-34). This theology informs, and thus pervades, much of the Hebrew Bible. Bart D. Ehrman has called its retributive perspective the “classical” or “prophetic” view of suffering, due to its espousal by the prophets of classical Israel. Both Ehrman and James L. Crenshaw (Defending God) have independently explored the multiplicity of biblical responses to the problem of suffering and, in doing so, have demonstrated the prevalence of this retributive view throughout the canon of biblical literature, from the Pentateuch (another name for the Torah, from the Greek πεντα + τευχοι, meaning “five scrolls”) and the Deuteronomistic history to the prophets and certain of the wisdom texts. This view is evident, for example, in such familiar biblical stories as the exile from Eden (Gen. 2.4b – 3.24), the global flood (Gen. 6 – 9), the destruction of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11.1 – 9), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18 – 19), and the ten plagues of Egypt preceding the Exodus (Exod. 5 – 12), among many others. It is worth mentioning that this view is also found in such books as the Pauline epistles, the canonical gospels, and the Apocalypse of John. It is this traditional retributive view of suffering, a consequence of a theology that understands God as both omnipotent and just, that informs much of the Bible (in both its Jewish and Christian forms), and it is this view to which the book of Job responds with moral outrage. The book of Job presents the astute reader with a number of hermeneutical problems in terms of linguistic ambiguity, structural integrity, and the differing theological perspectives contained within it. First, for the philologist, the text contains numerous instances of hapax legomena (words that occur only once in 26 26 the extant written record of a given language), rendering the meaning of certain passages uncertain and highly speculative. Translation is necessarily an interpretive endeavor, but the presence of uncertain words and phrases renders the process even more dependent upon the interpretation of the translator, who must rely on contextual clues and linguistic evidence derived from related languages in an attempt to determine the meaning of these words and phrases. This, of course, also renders the task of literary criticism difficult and problematic. Second, at the level of structural integrity, the text evidences a number of additions thought to have been incorporated long after its initial composition as well as a number of passages that appear to be either missing or mistakenly scrambled out of sequence, possibly due to scribal error. Third, the differing theological perspectives contained within the text suggest the possibility of dual, or even multiple, authorship, though they may also constitute an intentional rhetorical strategy on the part of a single author. Regardless, all of these textual features have led many modern critical scholars to doubt the original unity of the text. As a result of its ambiguity, its apparent disunity, and the complexity of its poetic content, Job has been considered by many scholars to be “the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible,” “the most difficult book of the Bible to interpret,” and “probably the most challenging book in the entire Bible” (Alter 3; Gruber 1500; Kushner 14). The book begins and ends with a brief prose “framing story,” which bookends a poetic dialogue or symposium that makes up the bulk of the text. This framing story, the setting of which “evokes the Patriarchal Period, when great biblical heroes like were the nomadic herders of large flocks of cattle, sheep, and goats,” relates the folktale of “Job the Patient,” a righteous gentile (evidently an Edomite) from “the land of Uz,” south of Judah (Gruber 1503). This righteous gentile is made to suffer in the prologue as a consequence of a divine 27 27 wager between YHWH and a subordinate supernatural being described as one of the “sons of God” (Hebrew: benê hāʼĕlōhîm, i.e., members of the divine council)1 and referred to as ha-śāṭān, meaning simply “the adversary” or “the accuser” (a title generally accepted to have been derived from a Semitic root meaning variously “to accuse,” “to obstruct,” “to oppose,” or “to persecute, be hostile to”).2 As Crenshaw notes, “At this stage in the development of Israel’s religious thought, the word is still a title and therefore has an article,” while Cilliers Breytenbach and Peggy L. Day explain that, “As in Job 1 and 2, the noun śāṭān appears with the definite article, and hence is not a proper name” (Whirlpool 58; 728). Furthermore, “the presence of the definite article also raises the question as to whether it denotes an office of Accuser in the divine council,” a likely possibility considering the divinely sanctioned role that this figure plays in the narrative and the authority bestowed upon him by YHWH (728-29). Hector Ignacio Avalos explains that this term is often applied to human beings as well, stating, “in the Hebrew Bible śāṭān could refer to any human being who played the role of an accuser or enemy (1 Sam. 29.4; 2 Sam. 19.22; 1 Kings 5.4, 11.14)” (678). Similarly, Rivkah Shärf Kluger speaks of the “original Old Testament profane [as opposed to sacred] meaning of the Satan concept,” explaining that “the noun śāṭān originally belonged to the profane sphere” (34). Significantly, as Kluger notes, “it is used with its profane meaning in texts older than those which depict the mythological Satan” (32).3 As in Job, “when it is used of human beings it is not a proper name, but rather a common noun meaning ‘adversary’ in either a

1 See Job 1.6 and Gen. 6.2; cf. Job 38.7 and Ps. 29.1.

2 On the etymology of the word, see Breytenbach & Day and Kluger 25-34.

3 For example, 1 Sam. 29.4, 2 Sam. 19.22, and I Kings 5.4, 11.14, 11.23, and 11.25. 28 28 political or military sense, or ‘accuser’ when it is used in a legal context” (Breytenbach & Day 726). Thus, the use of this common noun as a proper name referring to the “archenemy of God and the personification of evil” is evidently a much later inter-testamental development (Avalos 678).4 As a condition of this wager, which is concerned with the theme of “disinterested righteousness” (the question of whether a pious man might remain so even in the face of extreme adversity), Job loses first all of his material possessions (the animals and servants that constitute his livelihood) as well as his sons and daughters, who are crushed and killed when the house of the eldest brother collapses upon them (Crenshaw, Whirlpool 59-60, 75). He then loses his health, afflicted with “severe inflammation . . . from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (Jewish Study Bible, Job 2.7). Despite his wife’s advice to “Blaspheme God and die,” Job refuses to speak ill of the divine and is rewarded in the epilogue for his pious acceptance of the multifarious sufferings visited upon him (2.9). It is this Job who is praised for his “righteousness” in Ezekiel 14.14 and 14.20, and for his “patience” in James 5.11. While James seems to be referring here to the patient Job who appears in the prose, Ezekiel may be referring to an antecedent of this literary character, a pious hero of oral folklore upon which the prose narrative and its textual hero were based. Regardless, it is clear that neither Ezekiel nor James is referring to the defiant, argumentative Job of the poetry. This interpretation of Job as a pious paragon of unwavering faith, typically espoused by those who know only the patient Job of the prose framing narrative, remains the dominant interpretation in the popular consciousness, “a latter-day myth used to

4 See also Breytenbach & Day and chapter 6. 29 29 conceal the insurrection ignited by the clash of tradition [the doctrine of divine justice] with experience [the reality of unjust suffering]” (Safire 224). Kushner calls this prose narrative the “fable” rather than the folktale of Job, while Mayer Gruber draws a distinction between “the Book of Job the Patient” (the prose framework) and “the Book of Job the Impatient” (the poetic dialogue contained within it). Similarly, John E. Hartley distinguishes between “the account of Job’s trial and restoration” (the prose) and “numerous speeches that treat the issue of suffering” (the poetry) (3). In stark contrast to this prose narrative framework, chapters 3.1 – 42.6 of the text consist of a “poetic debate” comprised of three cycles of alternating monologues between an argumentative and defiant Job, who maintains his innocence and indicts God for acting unjustly, and his three friends (Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite), who assert the traditional wisdom doctrine of divine reward for the righteous and retribution for the wicked (Crenshaw, Job 332). In an attempt to “console and comfort” Job, these friends initially rend their robes and heap dirt upon their heads in a demonstration of compassion (lit. “suffering together/with,” from the Latin com + passum) that was customary of ancient cultures of the Mediterranean,5 and then sit with him in stillness for seven days until he breaks the silence with a powerful lament (2.11 – 13). They first respond to his lament by advising him to have faith in the possibility of divine restoration, since he is renowned for his unmatched piety and it is common knowledge that God’s nature is one of justice and mercy. Thus, they surmise that Job will be rewarded for his suffering in the end. They next suggest that perhaps Job has unwittingly committed some offense against

5 See, for example, Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. 30 30

God, or that his children were killed as a consequence of some offense that they had committed unbeknownst to him. The friends therefore recommend that he repent of his crimes and request forgiveness from God, to which Job responds with pleas of innocence and a request to be informed of the nature of his crimes if he is indeed guilty, as they insist that he must be. How can he possibly repent, he argues, if he is never told what he has done wrong? Soon, however, Job’s comforters quickly turn to false accusations and chastisement, using his misfortune as evidence against him and blaming him for his own affliction when he contests their arguments and refuses to repent on moral grounds. Here, in the poetic debate, particularly in their accusations against Job, the friends espouse the retributive worldview of the Hebrew wisdom tradition while Job refutes this position with a series of counter-arguments. Due to the impassioned protest of the poetry, Ricoeur sees Job’s “meditation on the suffering of the innocent” as a pivotal moment in the development of mythic thought. He places it in the category of the “Tragic” vision of existence, in which God (or the gods) is the source of evil, exemplified by the dramatic genre of ancient Athenian tragedy, as opposed to the category of the “Adamic” myth, in which man is responsible for evil, exemplified by the myth of the Fall related in Genesis 2.4b – 3.24. He contrasts these two myths and illuminates their relationship by explaining, “the evil that is committed leads to a just exile; that is what the figure of Adam represents. On the other hand, the evil that is suffered leads to an unjust deprivation; that is what the figure of Job represents. The first figure calls for the second; the second corrects the first” (324, emphasis in original). Thus, he views the book of Job as the single “upsetting document that records th[e] shattering of the moral vision of the world”: the doctrine of divine reward and retribution (314). Furthermore, Ricoeur sees this 31 31 shattering of the “ethical theology” of divine justice as the event that “begins the foolish business of trying to justify God,” the moment when “theodicy is born” (315). Similarly, René Girard sees the book of Job accomplishing something equally significant in the history of mythic consciousness. For him, Job is a pivotal text that, “for the first time[,] . . . allow[s] the victim to speak in the midst of his persecutors, in place of giving the usual mythological point of view of the persecutors concerning a victim who is perceived as guilty” (“Job as Failed Scapegoat” 205). Girard sees mimesis in Job’s adoption of the naïve theology espoused by his friends, whom Girard interprets as representatives of an entire community of persecutors. Furthermore, he sees the “scapegoat process” at work in the unanimous condemnation of Job by this community (205). In his analysis, Girard compares Job to Oedipus (the exemplary figure of his paradigm), of ancient Greek myth and the tragedies of Sophocles, seeing both characters as tragic figures who fall from privileged positions of respect and to positions of alienation and exile from the community. The significant between the two, according to Girard, is that, “unlike Oedipus, who finished by submitting, Job plunges into the debate frantically [and] accomplishes the unheard [by] resist[ing] the violent unanimity” of the scapegoat process (194). In the words of Stuart Lasine, who affirms Girard’s interpretation, “Job is a failed scapegoat . . . because he refuses to accept the community’s image of him as guilty and culpable, thereby preventing the complete unanimity required for the maximal efficiency of the scapegoat mechanism” (151). Thus, in the book of Job, the blame is removed from 32 32 the persecuted and rightfully placed on the persecutors, where it belongs, as Ricoeur, Girard, and Lasine all contend.6 Near the end of the debate, the parallelism of the book’s cyclical structure begins to break down. Bildad’s final speech is apparently cut short in the third cycle, and Zophar’s final speech is missing entirely, perhaps due to scribal error or deliberate censorship, though “some scholars find Zophar’s missing third speech in 27.7 – 23” (Gruber 1501). The poetry continues with a brief philosophical meditation on wisdom, which many scholars agree is most likely an interpolation derived “from another composition entirely,” followed by an insertion of four speeches by a new character named Elihu, whose sudden appearance in the text, with minimal introduction, adds little to the debate and interrupts the narrative sequence by which Job’s final speech effectively summons YHWH. Perhaps tellingly, YHWH appears after the four speeches of Elihu and then responds directly to Job, suspiciously neglecting to address Elihu’s presence or his arguments in either the divine speeches or the epilogue (Gruber 1501). As Gruber explains, most scholars regard the speeches of Elihu as a later addition by a different author, for the following reasons: Elihu is not mentioned in the narrative sections in chapters 2 and 42; neither Job nor God replies to him; He speaks in a Hebrew that differs from both the prose and the poetry of other parts of the book; and he seems to add nothing to what has been said before. (Jewish Study Bible 1546n4) Thus, these speeches (like the “Hymn to Wisdom” of chapter 28) also appear to be a later addition to the text. Some scholars have even suggested that

6 See also Girard, Job the Victim. 33 33 the Hymn to Wisdom may have been “incorporated into the book of Job by mistake because pages containing it were found among the writings composed by the author of the symposium” (Gruber 1503). Regardless, the poetry concludes with a pair of speeches by YHWH (38.1 – 41.26), who speaks to Job out of a “storm” (NIV, Scheindlin), “tempest” (JPS), or “whirlwind” (KJV, NRSV, Mitchell, Alter), using both intimidation and awe- inspiring descriptions of nature to silence him (38.1). Each speech by YHWH is followed by a corresponding response by Job. The ambiguity of these responses to the theophany (an “appearance of God,” from the Greek ϑεος + φανεια) continues to perplex modern readers, both laypersons and biblical specialists alike. It is this ambiguity that constitutes the critical crux of the text, upon which its interpretation largely hinges. In addition to these interpretive challenges, the task of accurately dating the text is also fraught with difficulty. The precise date of Job’s composition is uncertain and remains a subject of contention, but most modern critical scholars place it “somewhere between the seventh and the fourth centuries BCE,” with many placing it specifically “during the period from the mid-6th century to the mid-4th century, the Persian (Achaemenid) period (539 – 332 BCE)” following the exile of the Israelites in Babylon (Seow 726; Gruber 1502). Like so many books of the Bible, the authorship of Job is anonymous and unknown, though scholars speculate that the author of the poetry was drawing upon an antecedent oral folktale (the “fable” of Job the Patient) that had been in circulation in the ancient Near East for centuries, a claim supported by various antecedent parallels to the book of Job in the literatures of neighboring cultures. Among these similar texts are a series of declarations of innocence or “negative confessions” contained within the Book of Coming Forth by Day (the 34 34

Egyptian “Book of the Dead”), parallels of which are found in Job 31 (Matthews & Benjamin 219-22); an Egyptian text (Matthews & Benjamin 223-29) that “files a lawsuit against Egypt for its views on life and death” in the form of a trial between a sufferer who “proposes committing suicide as an antidote to his pain” and his ba soul, which asserts that the task of human beings is to “live life to its fullest,” much like the biblical Qoheleth (229, 225); an Egyptian protest narrative composed, like Job, of both prose and poetry, in which “an eloquent peasant . . . argues for his rights in the courts of Egypt” (Matthews & Benjamin 230-38); a didactic Sumerian variant of the “Job” motif known as “(A) Man and His God” (Kramer 352-57); and a “Babylonian theodicy,” often referred to as “the Babylonian Job” (Matthews & Benjamin 239-44; Biggs 374-79), in the form of a dialogue between a blasphemous sufferer and his pious friend that parallels Job’s poetic debate. In the Sumerian text, described by its ancient author as a “lamentation to a man’s (personal) god,” a sufferer demonstrates proper conduct by supplicating to this deity in the midst of suffering and is restored to joy when his “lamentation and wailing . . . soothe[s] the heart of his god,” moving him to mercy (Kramer 356, 354). Similar to the poetry of Job, the Babylonian text “argue[s] that a world filled with suffering and evil proves that the divine assembly cannot be just,” evidencing the antiquity of the problem of suffering (Matthews & Benjamin 239). All of these texts clearly share very similar structural forms and thematic content, creatively grappling with the problem of suffering. What is novel about the Joban poet’s version of this common ancient Near Eastern motif, however, is his apparent appropriation and radical reinterpretation of the hypothetical oral folktale for the purpose of refuting its worldview, a technique that adds considerable complexity, depth, and also ambiguity to the text in its dialogue of competing . Furthermore, the 35 35 poet introduces a theophany into his text, by which God himself addresses the sufferer directly, an innovation with somewhat ambiguous results. Most scholars have come to accept one of two hypotheses that serve to elucidate the many ambiguities inherent in the text: some contend that the prose prologue and epilogue that bookend the poetry were written by a separate author at an earlier or later date (due to distinct differences in both language and content), while others consider the poet to have used an oral form of the folktale as a framework to compose both the poetry and its prose bookends. The former hypothesis leads to two possible conclusions: either the prose framework was composed earlier and retained by the poet for the purpose of refuting its theology or, conversely, the poetry was composed earlier and the bookends later added in an attempt to temper the heresy of the poetry by providing a logical explanation for Job’s suffering (the wager of the prologue) and a positive resolution to it (the restoration of the epilogue) rather than ending with Job’s second and final response to the theophany. The former interpretation is far more compelling, though certain textual details suggest the possibility of dual (or perhaps even multiple) authorship, such as Job’s mention of his children as though they were still alive in the poetry and YHWH’s castigation of Job in the poetry. Textual evidence also suggests that there have been multiple editorial additions and revisions to the text as late as the 4th century BCE. As mentioned above, the Hymn to Wisdom and the speeches of Elihu may have been such later additions, possibly written by a redactor who was concerned about the unorthodox nature and accusatory tone of Job’s poetic speeches of protest, though some have contended that the poet himself later returned to the text and incorporated these additional elements. Regardless, as Gruber explains, 36 36

it is clear that in the view of many scholars, the text of Job has undergone considerable upheaval in the course of its transmission, and parts of it have become misplaced. Though there is no direct manuscript evidence of this for Job, evidence from the Dead Sea Scroll versions of other books suggests that biblical books grew over time, and that different recensions (versions or editions) of the same book could circulate in ancient Israel. . . . Unfortunately, however, the problems with the structure and growth of Job are so trenchant that there is no scholarly consensus concerning the stages of development of the book. (1501) As has been maintained by Edwin M. Good and others, it seems clear that Job’s primary concern is the problem of evil (more precisely, the undeserved suffering of the innocent), though Crenshaw identifies two distinct issues: “disinterested righteousness and innocent suffering,” adding that the answer to the question of which of these two themes is the dominant concern of the text “depends on whether we view things from above or below, through God’s eyes or Job’s” (Whirlpool 59-60). While acknowledging the former, the present study naturally concerns itself with the latter of these two themes. As discussed in the previous chapter, the problem of evil proper, as it appears in later western discourse, emerges out of the Christian tradition and is thus a subsequent development antedated by the book of Job. However, it is clear that Job is grappling with a more general form of this problem (the universal problem of suffering) within the culturally specific context of the religion of ancient Israel. In doing so, the book of Job presents a critique of the retributive doctrine of divine justice, demonstrating its falsity by the example of Job, who suffers as a condition of a wager between cosmic forces, rather than as a direct consequence of his 37 37 behavior. Furthermore, the book of Job provides no definitive solution to the problem but presents differing responses to it from the perspectives of “Job the Patient” in the prose narrative framework, “Job the Impatient” in the poetic dialogue, Job’s wife (who appears briefly and only in the prologue), the three friends of Job in the poetry, Elihu (a passerby who reiterates the retributive view of Job’s friends), and YHWH himself, who perplexingly rebukes Job for “speak[ing] without knowledge” in the poetry yet rewards him for speaking “the truth about me” in the prose (38.2, 42.7). As some scholars have suggested, the name Job (Hebrew: ’iyyôb) may be etymologically related to the Hebrew noun ’ōyyêb, meaning “enemy” (Hartley 66). More likely, it constitutes a case of deliberate, strategic wordplay, exploiting this phonetic resemblance to further suggest the agonistic nature of Job’s relationship with God. Indeed, Job himself refers to YHWH as his “foe” and complains of being treated “like an enemy” by God (16.10, 13.24). In a particularly heretical moment, he even goes so far as to refer to God as “the wicked one,” who “mocks as the innocent fail” and “covers the eyes of [the world’s] judges” (19.23 – 24). Gerhard von Rad (qtd. in Crenshaw) has analyzed this idea of “God as the direct enemy of men” in Job, and James L. Crenshaw has similarly explicated “Job’s perception of God as a personal enemy,” the latter noting the use of martial language to characterize the deity as a divine warrior on the attack: “Job thinks in the language of the military, so that he depicts God as an enemy who actively wages war against one person” (Whirlpool 62, 68, 68nn26-27, 71). Furthermore, the fact that Job is a gentile rather than an Israelite may constitute an intentional rhetorical device intended by its Israelite author to convey a sense that Job’s case is universal, for the problem of innocent suffering is not merely an Israelite concern but a concern of all who suffer undeservedly. 38 38

An informed analysis of this perplexing text in light of its cultural-historical context requires a familiarity with biblical history, which the remainder of the present chapter outlines very briefly, addressing select pivotal events most relevant to the discussion ahead, such as the covenant relationship between YHWH and his chosen people, the abuse of power and exploitation of the populace during the “Monarchic Period” (as evidenced by anti-monarchic sentiments contained within a number of the Prophetic Books), and, perhaps most significantly, the seemingly broken promises of YHWH during the exile in Babylon. An understanding of biblical history is important for any discussion of Job because it provides the cultural-historical context from which the text emerged and enables its engagement in an inter-textual dialogue with other books of the Bible. By necessity, the following historical reconstruction is a selective and interpretive history, as any historical narrative inevitably is. In order to highlight the ancient Israelite perspective, the narrative trajectory of this history roughly corresponds to the historical details as they appear in the Bible, using the texts themselves as a starting point and incorporating extra-biblical evidence (i.e., material remains and documentary evidence produced by neighboring peoples) when helpful, whether for the purpose of elucidating the uncertain early history of ancient Israel or illustrating but a few of the numerous hermeneutical problems faced by biblical historians, archaeologists, and philologists. In other words, it primarily follows the “theoretical or theological chronology, which considers the meanings and purposes of chronological schemes used as a literary vehicle of religious conceptions,” while incorporating elements of the “historical or scientific chronology, which deals with the real chronology of actual events” (Barr 117). It is the intention of the author that this narrative, far from being comprehensive, will provide sufficient context to orient readers in the conceptual landscape within 39 39 which the book of Job was written and enable them to actively participate in critical inquiry of the text in the analysis of the following chapter. Thus, let us begin with the Pentateuch, which comprises the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. After the “Primeval History” of Genesis (known in Judaism by its incipit, Bereshit) chapters 1 – 11, which contain the familiar myths of creation, the exile from the garden of Eden, the global flood, and others, chapters 12 – 50 relate the events of the “Patriarchal Period,” in which the legendary patriarch Abraham (also called Abram) receives an unconditional promise from YHWH, who declares that he will lead Abraham into the land of Canaan and will make of his descendants a chosen people who will grow into “a great nation” within that land7 (Flanders, Crapps, & Smith 6). During a time of famine in this promised land (Gen. 12.10), however, the “Abrahamic Covenant” remains unfulfilled when the ancestors of the Israelites are forced to migrate to Egypt and settle there for a time before, according to the book of Exodus (known in Judaism by its incipit, Shemot), being forced into slave labor by an anonymous Egyptian pharaoh for fear of the threat that their increase might pose to the Egyptian state in the future (Exod. 1.8 – 14). Eventually, led by a fugitive named and guided by YHWH, here conceived as a liberator god “who stands by the poor and frees the enslaved,” the Israelites flee Egypt to escape oppression under the rule of “Pharaoh” (Ceresko 106). If there is any “historical kernel” to the Exodus narrative, then this pharaoh may have been Merneptah (r. 1213 – 1203 BCE), the son of Rameses II (r. 1279 – 1213 BCE), though to date no archaeological evidence or extra-biblical record of such a mass exodus from Egypt has been discovered (Tigay 104). It is more likely,

7 See Gen. 12.1 – 3, 12.7, and 15.18 – 21. 40 40 scholars surmise, that a much smaller group of refugees, referred to by some as the “Moses group,” migrated into Canaan and merged with other “in-migrant” refugees who had fled from oppressive city-states within the land of Canaan and settled in the hill country, as suggested by the archaeological record, though much of Israel’s early history remains uncertain until approximately the 7th century BCE (Ceresko 97-106).8 According to the books of Exodus (Shemot), Numbers (Bemidbar), and Deuteronomy (Devarim), the Israelites wander in the wilderness for forty years before arriving at Mount Sinai, where Moses receives the torah (“teaching” or “instruction”), which establishes the conditional promise of the “Mosaic Covenant,” the foundation of the Moses/Sinai traditions (as contrasted with the later David/Zion traditions of the Monarchic Period). According to the Moses/Sinai traditions, YHWH is the divine suzerain of the Israelites, and there can be no other legitimate sovereign. YHWH establishes this relationship with his elected people by instituting a conditional agreement with them in the form of the covenant at Sinai. The covenant itself is presented much like a legally binding contract, applying the form and legal language typical of suzerainty documents of the ancient Near East, such as the “Hittite vassal treaty” (also called the “Hittite suzerainty treaty”), which indicates that it served a similar function by establishing a king-and-vassal relationship between YHWH and Israel (Ceresko 87-92). According to the conditional promise of the covenant, YHWH will grant the Moses group a land to inhabit and make of them a prosperous nation, provided that they act in accordance with his will and abide by the tōrāh, the laws of the covenant. Thus, he leads them into the promised land of Canaan, “a land flowing

8 See also Finkelstein & Silberman and Finkelstein & Mazar. 41 41 with milk and honey,” and directs them to claim it by force, through the extermination and displacement of its present inhabitants (Exod. 33.3; Deut. 31.20). Here begins the “Deuteronomistic History” recorded in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, which relate the biblical view of Israel’s origins in the land and the period of the monarchy. According to the book of Joshua, which presents the traditional “conquest model” of the nation’s origins, the Israelites return to and conquer the land of their ancestors, displacing and exterminating various Canaanite peoples under the military leadership of a man named Joshua (more precisely, Yehoshua, originally called Hosea or Hoshea). 9 The book of Judges, on the other hand, implies a gradual settlement of the various individual tribes of YHWH over time rather than a unified military invasion. In contrast with both of these views, as mentioned above, the presence of agricultural technology (in the form of limestone cisterns) as well as consistent pottery typology of material remains discovered by archaeologists at various sites within the land suggest that the inhabitants of these settlements were indigenous in- migrant Canaanites who had fled from nearby city-states into sparsely settled areas of the hill country, rather than nomadic invaders who had migrated into the land from outside of Canaan (Ceresko 97-106). According to the “social revolution model” proposed by Norman Gottwald and refined by others, a loosely allied confederation of tribal communities forms as various disaffected groups of people, including a group of immigrants from Egypt (the Moses group), flee from oppression and settle in the hill country of Canaan. Over time, these disparate peoples, along with their myths, traditions, and even genealogies, merge and

9 See Num. 13.16. 42 42 eventually become consolidated, their respective communities united by similar circumstances of flight from oppression and a shared devotion to a patron liberator god, whether imported from outside of Canaan by the Moses group or adopted from an existing Canaanite pantheon within the land. Mark S. Smith10 has argued that YHWH was imported from Edom or some other locale south of the land and was incorporated into an existing Canaanite pantheon evidenced in ancient Ugaritic inscriptions. This Ugaritic pantheon included the gods El and Baal (an alternate name for the storm god Hadad as well as a common reverential title meaning, “Lord”) and the Anat and Asherah, the latter of which was the divine consort of El and possibly of YHWH as well.11 In Smith’s view, YHWH becomes identified with the patron deity of the Ugaritic pantheon (the patriarchal sky god El) and the two eventually coalesce, a hypothesis that provides an explanation for the use of both “YHWH” and “El” as names for the national god of the Israelites throughout the Hebrew Bible, parallel descriptions of these in biblical and Ugaritic texts, and the use of epithets such as Shaddai (commonly translated as “Almighty”), Baal (“Lord”), and Elyon (“Most High”) as alternate names for YHWH throughout the Hebrew Bible. Whether or not Smith’s hypothesis is correct, it is clear that the Israelites adopted these common Semitic epithets and that “some of the divine names compounded with El in the Hebrew Bible were probably originally used of non-Israelite deities” (Emerton 548). According to Jo Ann Hackett, “some contemporary scholars propose that what distinguished ‘Israel’ from other emerging Canaanite Iron I societies was religion—the belief in Yahweh as one’s god rather than Chemosh (of

10 See also Cross and Day, Yahweh and the Gods.

11 See, for example, Hadley and Dever, Did God Have a Wife?. 43 43 the Moabites), for example, or Milcom (of the Ammonites)” (156). This is perhaps unsurprising, since, as Hackett notes, “the early Iron Age marked the rise of national religion in the Near East, tying belief in the national god to ethnic identity” (156). Thus, Hackett explains, “the Israelites are the people of Yahweh, just as the Moabites are the people of Chemosh; Ammonites, worshipers of Milcom; Edomites, of Qaus. And farther east, the Assyrians follow Ashur into battle” (156). Furthermore, the evidence from this period “points to the covenant with Yahweh as one of the defining element’s of Israel’s culture, and one that distinguished it from its neighbors: the covenant metaphor is not found in other ancient Near Eastern texts” (158). “According to the covenant,” Hackett adds, while other gods may exist for other cultures, Yahweh is Israel’s god and they, in turn, are his people. Yahweh will protect them, give them space to live, and provide fertility for their animals and crops; and they in return will not worship other gods but will observe the form of Yahweh’s worship that existed at that time. (158) It is therefore clear that what bound this community together, and what differentiated it from neighboring peoples, was a common allegiance to a national patron deity. This adherence to the religion of Yahweh, the central feature of which was the covenant relationship that these settlers shared with their patron god, would likely have provided the impetus for greater social solidarity among this loosely allied tribal confederation, which in turn, one imagines, would have aided in the consolidation and preservation of what would develop into the religious traditions of the later nation of Israel during the Monarchic Period. After generations in the land of Canaan, and during a period of imminent threat from neighboring imperial powers, a more structured political organization becomes necessary as a means of defense. Here, again, the facts are difficult to 44 44 ascertain and the process of historical reconstruction requires a great deal of speculation, based upon both textual and extra-textual evidence. According to Carol Meyers, “a centralized state was formed late in the eleventh century,” and “by the middle of the tenth century, according to the biblical narrative, this state reached near imperial proportions,” though scholars contest the grandeur of the Monarchic Period based upon archaeological evidence that suggests a much smaller scale than what is described in the texts (165). According to 1 Samuel, this process of centralization and greater political unity begins when Saul is anointed by the prophet Samuel and becomes the first “king” of Israel, a kingship “grounded in conflict between deity, prophet, and people” due to the replacement of YHWH by a human sovereign, a supplantation interpreted as a “rejection” of God (1 Sam. 8.6 – 9). Ultimately, Saul appears to have been unsuccessful, perhaps due to the incompatibility of a statist political system with the egalitarian Moses/Sinai traditions.12 The first successful kingship develops with the establishment of the theocratic Davidic monarchy, whose power was apparently retroactively legitimated and bolstered by the propagandist rhetoric of an unconditional promise by YHWH (through the prophet Nathan). In fact, the later “medieval concept of the divine right of kings would be based on biblical precedents associated with the Davidic dynasty” (Meyers 166). According to this “Davidic Covenant,” YHWH promises to establish an eternal kingdom of Israel in Canaan, which will remain forever undisturbed by its enemies and which will always be ruled by an heir of David on the throne (2 Sam. 7.8 – 16). At this pronouncement, 2 Samuel relates, David begins a series of divinely sanctioned military campaigns to once again

12 See Ceresko. 45 45 subdue the various peoples of the land, attacking and defeating the Philistines, the Moabites, the Arameans, the Ammonites, the Edomites, and other neighboring nations (2 Sam. 8). According to 2 Samuel, a pro-Davidic text perhaps commissioned during the reign of Solomon (the son and successor of David), “The LORD [i.e., YHWH] gave victory to David wherever he went” (8.14). Thus, according to the text, David conquers Jerusalem, “the stronghold of Zion, now the city of David” (called Jebus and inhabited by the Jebusites), establishing it as the holy capital city of Israel and the nexus of Yahwism, the institutional worship of YHWH (1 Chron. 11.1 – 9). According to Anthony Ceresko’s interpretation of the events of the Monarchic Period, David may have strategically adopted Canaanite religious traditions and incorporated them into the existing Moses/Sinai traditions, which would have earned him Canaanite support within the city but would also have caused many Israelite adherents to the Moses/Sinai traditions to become increasingly critical of the monarchy, as reflected in the anti-monarchic rhetoric of many of the prophets. Furthermore, it is clear that the Monarchic Period witnessed the acute suffering of the populace under a socio-economically stratified order that was antithetical to the Moses/Sinai traditions of the tribal confederacy and its of mutual aid, a social system that would have proven beneficial for survival in the hill country where conditions were harsh and subsistence difficult. During this period, Ceresko contends, the ruling elites enforced exploitative taxation upon the populace in order to maintain status, wealth, and luxury at the top of this socio-economic hierarchy, as rulers are wont to do (an unsurprising trend evidenced time and again throughout the historical 46 46 record).13 As a result, many of the prophets interpret this practice (and the monarchy itself) as a violation of certain ethical commandments of the covenant, which promote egalitarianism and social justice among Israelites. Many of the prophets are also critical of the monarchy’s tolerance of idolatry (the worship of other gods) within the holy city of Jerusalem and especially among Israelites, predicting divine retribution as a consequence. According to the biblical record of this period, David is succeeded by Solomon, who commissions the building of the temple in Jerusalem, the literal house of YHWH on earth, in which is housed the hallowed “ark of the covenant of YHWH,” a golden chest conceived as the throne and “footstool” of YHWH and containing the stone tablets of the Mosaic Covenant established at Sinai (1 Sam. 4.4; 1 Chron. 28.2).14 According to Ceresko’s liberation perspective, civil war eventually erupts among the populace, perhaps due to the exploitative economic policies of the monarchy and the social conditions that they engendered, resulting in a schism in which the unified nation of Israel splits into a “divided monarchy” comprised of the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, though many scholars contest the historicity of the united monarchy based upon archaeological data, considering it an invention of a later period intended to glorify Israel’s past.15 After this supposed schism, a devastating turn of events transpires, as the armies of the Neo-Assyrian Empire begin a series of military campaigns by which they systematically invade and eventually conquer the northern kingdom in 722

13 See also Meyers 166.

14 See Hackett 157-58.

15 See, for example, Finkelstein & Silberman and Finkelstein & Mazar. 47 47

BCE after a three-year siege of the capital city Samaria, slaughtering and displacing multitudes in the process. This event is interpreted by prophets of the southern kingdom as a form of divine retribution for the crime of idolatry (an offense against YHWH) among the inhabitants of the northern kingdom. The conquest of the northern kingdom is followed by a period of Assyrian control and repeated invasions of Judah as the southern kingdom struggles to maintain its independence. The Neo-Assyrian Empire is eventually supplanted by the Neo- Babylonian Empire, and in 586 BCE, during the imperial reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonians conquer the southern kingdom of Judah. The temple in Jerusalem, the literal house of YHWH containing the sacred ark of the covenant as well as the ḵāḇōḏ (the radiant “Presence” or “Glory”) of YHWH, is destroyed, the Judean king Zedekiah taken prisoner, and the surviving Israelites led in captivity to Babylon. Many scholars consider this period instrumental in the development of monotheism out of the normative or (the worship of a single deity without denying the existence of others) of the “official religion” of ancient Israel, as opposed to its polytheistic “popular religion,” which included the worship of other Canaanite deities, whether as a result of religious syncretism or as a vestige of an earlier polytheistic form of the official religion influenced by the Ugaritic pantheon, as Smith contends.16 It is in these terms that Smith considers the Hebrew Bible a source of not only ancient Israel’s collective cultural memory, but also its collective cultural amnesia, arguing that its texts contain evidence of the polytheistic origins of its faith, despite the subsequent suppression of those origins (Memoirs). Some scholars have postulated the existence of a hypothetical

16 See especially Early History and Memoirs. 48 48

“Yahweh-alone” movement, which gave rise to the “one-god worldview” of post- exilic Judaism and the later Abrahamic faiths, though this theory has failed to garner widespread acceptance (Halpern 526; Smith, Memoirs). Regardless of the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of this claim, it is clear that, “starting apparently in the 9th century BCE, Israelites began to distinguish YHWH starkly from other gods,” though “it is unknown whether the distinction originated from the opposition between YHWH and foreign high gods or between YHWH and local ancestral gods. Still, the alienation of the local gods from YHWH ensued, as subordinate gods were identified as foreign” (Halpern 526). As Smith explains, the period of the monarchy appears to have played a significant role in the transition to monotheism via processes of convergence, by which characteristics of other Canaanite deities such as El and Baal were absorbed and incorporated into Israel’s theological understanding of YHWH, and differentiation, whereby the Yahwistic faith (along with ancient Israelite identity) distinguished itself from other co-existent forms of Canaanite religious expression by rejecting and suppressing its Canaanite heritage, a theme attested to in the numerous injunctions against idolatry found throughout the Hebrew Bible. Smith also asserts that both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah were heavily influenced by Neo-Assyrian culture (Early History). It has been theorized that it is during the period of exile in Babylon that the biblical canon begins to become codified and concretized in written form in an attempt to preserve the traditions of Israel (their beliefs, narratives, and ritual practices) during the captivity of its peoples in a foreign land. In this context, the Genesis myth of the exile from Eden (2.4b – 3.24) may be understood as a mythic representation of longing for a utopian time and space free from pain and hardship, a vision akin to the ancient Greek “Golden Age” recorded in Hesiod’s Works and 49 49

Days (lines 109 – 201) and retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.89 – 1.150). In this myth, as with the Babylonian exile itself, the blame is placed upon human beings, who bear the burden of guilt in order to preserve a conception of divine justice.17 Many scholars also consider the period of the Babylonian conquest and exile to be a prominent influence upon the content of the book of Job, due to the tremendous suffering endured by the Israelites, whose patron god had seemingly been defeated by the rival Babylonian god Marduk. At this point in history, the divine promises of YHWH, who had liberated the Israelites from slavery and had sworn (as a condition of the Mosaic Covenant) to shield them from further catastrophes provided that they abide by his commandments, appear to have been broken, causing widespread disillusionment among the Israelite community. This disillusionment is preserved within the Hebrew Bible, which comprises a plurality of interpretations of this pivotal event, evidencing the polyvocal nature of its authorship. The conquest of Judah, and the subsequent period of captivity in exile that followed it, may have been a prominent influence on Job’s poetic dialogue in particular, as evidenced by the apparent skepticism of the text and its emphasis on abandonment, unjust punishment, and the incomprehensibility of the undeserved suffering of the innocent. As a result of this catastrophe, and the tremendous sufferings that it produced (many of which are powerfully lamented in the poetry of the books of Psalms and Lamentations), a number of the prophets interpret the monarchy as an apostasy or “rejection” of YHWH that replaces the true sovereign with a human king, thus evoking the wrath of their national deity. The Babylonian conquest is therefore interpreted in a number of distinct ways: (1) as a defeat of YHWH by

17 See Crenshaw, “Introduction” and, more recently, Defending God. 50 50

Marduk, the patron god of the Babylonians; (2) as an intentional abandonment by YHWH, who “hides his face” from his chosen people in anger (a concept known today by the phrase hastarat panim18), symbolized in Ezekiel by the departure of the ḵāḇōḏ from the temple (8 – 11); and, (3) as divine retribution, whether for offenses committed against YHWH, fellow Israelites, or both. According to the lattermost interpretation, YHWH had used the Babylonian army as an instrument to punish the Israelites for their disobedience and to coerce them by force to return to the commandments of the Mosaic Covenant. Furthermore, the worship of other Canaanite deities among the Israelites, including the practice of offering sacrifices to these deities, was interpreted as an act of unfaithfulness to YHWH because it breaks ḥeseḏ (“covenant fidelity”) by violating the first commandment of the Decalogue (the “Ten Commandments” recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy). It is in the book of Exodus that YHWH is explicitly described as “a jealous god . . . whose name is Jealous,” a statement that attests to Israel’s henotheism (monolatry) at the time of its composition (34.4). One of numerous examples of YHWH’s jealousy is provided by the prophet Hosea, who metaphorically equates the crime of idolatry with the analogous crime of adultery in vivid, poetic descriptions of YHWH’s rejection and brutal sexual shaming of his “wife of whoredom” (the nation of Israel) as a punishment for straying (lit., “whoring away”) from him in pursuit of other “lovers,” a metaphor for the worship of foreign gods.19 Hosea’s creative employment of this metaphor serves a twofold purpose: first, it indicts the nation of Israel for her violation of ḥeseḏ in anticipation of the imminent conquest of the

18 See Kushner, Book of Job 176-78.

19 See especially Hosea 1 – 3. 51 51 northern kingdom during the 8th century BCE, though the text was almost certainly written after this event or edited by later redactors in an attempt to “explain the reasons for the disasters that befell Israel”; second, it offers hope for the renewal of the Mosaic Covenant and the restoration of a unified nation of Israel in the land if and only if her people (described as “children of whoredom” and “a harlot’s brood”) repent and return to YHWH (Ben Zvi 1143). In Hosea, YHWH similarly objects to the use of the names of Canaanite gods (such as Baal, both a proper name and a title meaning “Lord”) as epithets for him, a practice also interpreted as infidelity (1.2, 2.6, 2.18). Finally, a number of the prophets (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah among them) concern themselves with social justice, frequently evoking mišpāṭ (“justice”) and ṣeḏāqāh (“righteousness”) in their rhetoric of social reform. Thus, they interpret the exploitative policies of the monarchy also as a violation of ḥeseḏ. According to this perspective, Israel’s violation of the laws of the Mosaic Covenant, the conditional agreement of the Moses/Sinai traditions, is directly responsible for the sufferings of the nation’s people. The prophets therefore interpret the Babylonian exile as a form of divine retribution, whether for the unjust policies of the monarchy, the worship of “alien gods” (such as the Canaanite storm god Baal), or both. This retributive view of suffering informs the collective ancient Israelite understanding of the nation’s relationship to its god as a series of anonymous scribes compile, compose, edit, and revise the sacred narratives, customs, laws, ritual practices, and historical interpretations of their people over the course of centuries, eventually establishing a canon of texts that ultimately results in the formation of the Hebrew Bible as it is known today. Following the exile, the Israelites are eventually allowed to return to Jerusalem by Cyrus II (praised as “the LORD’s messiah” by Ezra and Isaiah) after 52 52 the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE. The restoration of the Israelites in their promised land and the commencement of the reconstruction of the temple mark the beginning of what has come to be called the “Second Temple Period.” The book of Job (the poetry, at the least) is thought to have been composed sometime during either the Exilic or Post-Exilic Period in or shortly after the 6th century BCE (though some scholars place it as late as the 4th century BCE), a plausible hypothesis based upon detailed philological and historical analysis of its language and content (the concerted efforts of numerous scholars, among them Marvin H. Pope) and given the symbolic parallelism of the text’s structure to the events surrounding the exile: Job begins in a position of privilege (the Monarchic Period, as remembered by the later Israelite community), is afflicted and experiences a sense of abandonment and moral outrage against God for his unjust suffering (the Babylonian conquest and the subsequent Exilic Period), and is eventually restored to his former status in the prose epilogue, symbolizing the return of Israel to the promised land and the restoration of its relationship with God (the Post-Exilic Period). This interpretation, of course, assumes the unity of the text and requires either an exilic or post-exilic date of composition, the former of which would render Israel’s symbolic restoration in the epilogue (represented by Job’s restoration) anticipatory, a reading which would suggest that the text is perhaps a prophetic book intended to instruct its readers (or hearers) in the proper course of action required to ensure their own restoration in the land. According to this interpretation, then, Job’s final submission to YHWH represents Israel’s return to the covenant with a newfound understanding of God and the suffering that their people had endured. Finally, a number of scholars of the past have argued that the book of Job was originally a dramatic work influenced by the classical Greek tragedians of 5th 53 53 century Athens. Horace Kallen endorsed this hypothesis, calling the text “a Greek tragedy in the manner of Euripedes” and “restoring” it to its hypothetical original, dramatic form, contending “first, that it is the work of Hebrew poet aware of Euripedes’ tragic form but un-Greek in his emulation of it; second, that he followed the Greek precedent by framing his heresy in orthodox events and symbols; [and] third, that the form he gave his tragedy was scrambled from the dramatic to the narrative when Job was added to the canonical scriptures . . . in order to fit the conventional perspectives of the dominant Judaism of the time” (vii, ix). This interpretation of the text, however interesting, has failed to gain widespread acceptance among contemporary scholars. While the book of Job is most prominently a meditation on the problem of suffering in the context of the Yahwistic religion of ancient Israel, it may also reflect anti-authoritarian (i.e., anti-monarchic) sentiments in its portrayal of exploitative power wielded by a tyrannical God who arbitrarily tortures an innocent victim to prove a point to a subordinate (ha-śāṭān, the “adversary”) who has challenged his authority. Moreover, it contains apparent allusions to certain passages of Psalms and 2 Isaiah (and possibly other biblical texts as well, including Genesis) and presents a direct counter to the conventional wisdom of the proverbs, particularly the traditional retributive worldview endorsed by much of the biblical canon. Thus, let us begin our analysis of the text by situating the book of Job within the context of the ancient Hebrew wisdom tradition before proceeding to engage it in an inter-textual dialogue with the views of this tradition.

CHAPTER 3 – THE BOOK OF JOB: THE RETRIBUTIVE VIEW OF SUFFERING AND ITS REFUTATION

In the context of biblical literature, wisdom (Hebrew: hōkmā) is a multi- faceted term. Crenshaw defines it, first, as a distinct literary genre that comprises a corpus of “widely divergent” texts yet nonetheless “expresses itself with remarkable thematic coherence” (Old Testament Wisdom 10, 12). This genre, as both he and Michael V. Fox explain, is shared by other cultures of the ancient Near East, as evidenced by parallel texts in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian literature written “starting in the late third millennium BCE and extending to the Hellenistic period, as late as the third century BCE” (Fox 1448).1 Second, Crenshaw defines wisdom as “a particular attitude toward reality, a worldview” (11). This worldview, as it appears in ancient Israelite literature, evidences several features: first, it is anthropocentric (it “begins with humans as the fundamental point of orientation”); second, it is optimistic (it “ that all things can be learned through experience”); third, it is monotheistic (it assumes that “the one God embedded truth within all of reality”); and, fourth, it is practical (it assumes that “the human responsibility is to search for that insight and thus to live in harmony with the cosmos”) (11). Its “fundamental assumption,” though, “consisted of a conviction that being wise meant a search for and maintenance of a stable society, in a word, a just order” (12). From this fundamental assumption, Crenshaw explains, “it naturally follows that human actions had cosmic implications” (12). Similarly, in Robert Alter’s formulation, wisdom “raises questions of value and moral behavior, of the meaning of human life, and

1 See chapter 2. 55 55 especially of the right conduct of life” (xiv). Thus, the Hebrew wisdom tradition espouses three central claims: (1) the world operates according to divine justice (that is, God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked); (2) God has created the world and embedded truth within it, as personified by “Lady Wisdom” in chapters 1 – 9 of the book of Proverbs; and (3) human beings are capable of “reading” the world and making sense of it by virtue of their mental faculties, with which they have been imbued by God. As Crenshaw rightly notes, when tested against the empirical evidence of human experience, “this confidence in the world and human potential gives rise to profound skepticism, but such a heart-rending cry bears eloquent testimony to a grand vision of what ought to be, a vision that persists even though despair has overwhelmed the ” (Old Testament Wisdom 11). It is in this manner (a “heart-rending cry” of “profound skepticism”) that the book of Job effectively challenges the above suppositions by testing them against a fictional case of undeserved suffering, using this case as a medium to pose critical questions about the ability (or inability) of human beings to comprehend the workings of the cosmos, the nature of God, the suffering of the righteous, and the prosperity of the wicked. In the rigorous argumentation of the poetic debate, Job argues against the doctrine of divine justice based upon the evidence of personal experience. Alter affirms this interpretation, characterizing the poetry as “a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked [that] dissents from a consensus view of biblical —a dissent compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward” (3). 56 56

This anthropocentric perspective views human beings as the ultimate goal of creation. In the book of Genesis, for example, human beings are made in imago dei (Hebrew: ṣelem ĕlōhîm), in the “image of God,”2 who grants them dominion over the earth, instructing them to “master” it and to “rule” all of its inhabitant organisms (Gen. 1.26, 1.28). Furthermore, the covenant relationship between YHWH and the Israelites (attested throughout the Pentateuch, the Deuteronomistic history, and the prophetic literature) evidences a special relationship between God and humanity (specifically, between the Israelites and their patron deity, YHWH). The god of Job challenges this perspective during the theophany, in which he asserts the insignificance of humankind in the vast arena of the cosmos through a series of poetic descriptions of the immensity and power of nature, in effect deemphasizing the role that humanity plays in the grand scheme of creation. Thus, the following analysis examines three distinct perspectives on suffering presented by the text: (1) a pedagogical, didactic, or instructive view of suffering that interprets the experience as a divine test by which God imparts some lesson to the sufferer or tests his integrity by challenging his faith, as evidenced by the prose narrative framework; (2) the retributive view espoused by Job’s friends (and an interloper named Elihu), along with its converse perspective (an anti- retributive view suggested by Job’s refutation of divine justice), as evidenced in the poetic debate; and (3) a cosmocentric perspective that asserts the relative insignificance of human beings, the amorality of a transcendent god, and the mysterious nature of suffering. This lattermost view is the perspective presented by the divine speeches of YHWH, which contrast humanity’s relative ignorance and insignificance with his own omnipotence and infinite wisdom.

2 See Gen. 1.26 – 27, 5.1 – 3, and 9.6. 57 57

Accordingly, the analysis ahead strategically examines three major divisions of the text, selecting representative passages in support of each view from among numerous possible examples. The three major sections analyzed are as follows: (1) the prose narrative framework, (2) the poetic debate, and (3) the theophany, including Job’s ambiguous responses to it, which seem to affirm the claims of human insignificance and cosmic indifference asserted by YHWH, though the effectiveness of Job’s protest (i.e., its ability to summon YHWH) suggests otherwise, as does the divine wager of the prologue. Ultimately, the poet-author of Job forges new understandings of both God and suffering by refusing to replace the retributive view with another equally dogmatic view. Instead, he insists that God’s nature is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral, and emphasizes the unknowable mystery of creation, asserting the inability of human wisdom to penetrate to the source of this enigma. The poet, therefore, makes no claims of definitive understanding, other than his assured refutation of the retributive view and its reductive understanding of God. Thus, the problem of suffering, for Job, becomes a matter of , a philosophical inquiry into the limitations of human knowledge. The poet’s approach, then, is an agnostic (from the Greek α + γνῶσις, meaning “without knowledge”) admission of ignorance, much like the wisdom of the famous “Socratic paradox”: “I know that I know nothing.” Rather than asserting any particular interpretation of suffering, the poet simply argues against a specific interpretation (the retributive view), which he deems both false and oppressive. Thus, he offers a corrective of this worldview through the rhetoric of protest. Finally, the poet (as represented by Job) finds a humble contentment in the realization that human beings are not the center of creation and that some things, 58 58 such as the mysterious nature of God and the elusive meaning of undeserved suffering, are beyond human understanding.

The Prose Narrative Framework: Suffering as a Test of Faith The prose framework suggests an interpretation of suffering as a test of one’s faith in the justice of God, a common theme in various parallel myths of the ancient Near East, many of which antedate the book of Job.3 Within this framework, Job rebukes his wife for speaking “as any shameless woman might talk” by urging him to “Blaspheme God and die,” adding “Should we accept only good from God and not accept evil?” (2.9 – 10). Here, Job agrees that God is the source of both good and “evil,” but despite his personal suffering he maintains that human beings should accept both fortune and misfortune without complaint, regardless of the apparent injustice or senselessness of the circumstances. Furthermore, the omniscient narrator of the prose framework explicitly states that, despite all of his suffering, “Job said nothing sinful,” reflecting the patient and pious Job of the hypothetical oral folktale, a character starkly contrasted with the argumentative and defiant Job of the poetry (1.22). Here, it is worth recalling the biblical myth of the akedah (the “binding (of Isaac),” found in Gen. 22), in which God “put[s] Abraham to the test” by commanding him to sacrifice his young son Isaac, saying, “Take your son, your favored one, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (22.1, 2). Abraham willingly complies, though he is interrupted before completing the task. Due to this compliance, Abraham (much like Job) has been praised as the “father of faith” by philosopher Søren

3 See chapter 2. 59 59

Kierkegaard and countless others for his pious subordination of reason to his faith in God, despite the that YHWH’s seemingly irrational command engenders, since the death of Isaac would seem to negate any possibility for the fulfillment of the unconditional promise of the Abrahamic covenant (the establishment of a great nation of Abraham’s descendants through Isaac). Both the myth of the akedah and the folktale of Job, along with this pious interpretation, are problematic for modern readers because they commend uncritical obedience to the commands of divine authority, despite the sub-textual ethical dilemmas inherent in each case. The poetic debate of Job, on the other hand, would seem to suggest that the appropriate response to such an abuse of power (divine or otherwise) is moral outrage and defiance through protest. Some scholars have speculated that the akedah may constitute an adoption and emendation of an earlier ancient Near Eastern myth of the type containing this familiar “divine test” motif.4 In this hypothetical earlier form, scholars infer, the sacrifice of the son by the father is fulfilled, rather than interrupted by an angel (lit. a “messenger,” from the Greek ἄγγελος) of God, and the child later resurrected as a reward for his father’s pious obedience to the will of God, much as Job is rewarded with new children in the epilogue to replace those killed in the prologue (a recompense offensive to modern sensibilities). Thus, the akedah may constitute a direct parallel to the oral folktale of Job the Patient. Based upon this model, the amendment of the akedah narrative has been interpreted as a conscious rejection of the cultic practice of child sacrifice, an act of devotion to the gods that was apparently prevalent among the Punics (Carthaginians) of North Africa and probably the Canaanites and Phoenicians of

4 See Zuckerman 16-25. 60 60 the Levant as well, as attested by archaeological evidence (both material and inscriptional) discovered at a number of apparent “Tophets” (from the Hebrew: h -tōp eṯ, “burning place”) of Carthage as well as numerous biblical condemnations of the practice among both Canaanites and Israelites (e.g., Lev. 18.21; Deut. 18.10 – 13; 1 Kings 11.4 – 11; 2 Kings 23.10; Jer. 7.30 – 34, 19.1 – 5, 32.30 – 35).5 The practice as it occurred in Carthage is explicitly described in classical sources written by Greek and Roman historians such as Diodorus Sicilus (ca. 90 – ca. 30 BCE) and Plutarch (ca. 45/6 – ca. 120 CE), but these sensational accounts are most likely embellished, and their numbers greatly exaggerated, for the propagandizing purpose of slandering the enemy of Rome in order to justify the Roman destruction of Carthage, not unlike the ridiculously inflated Spanish accounts of human sacrifice among the Mexica, which were used to justify the conquest and, along with it, the brutal subjugation and slaughter of indigenous peoples.6 According to this interpretation, the akedah constitutes a corrective myth intended by its tellers to abolish the practice among its hearers. As Zuckerman explains, this “akedah model” can be applied to the book of Job as well, a method that aids in illuminating the layers of historical counterpoint embedded within the text (Zuckerman 16-25). In Job, this counterpoint is both a response to an antecedent myth of unquestioning obedience (the oral folktale of Job the Patient) and a response to the doctrine of divine justice that it supports. As preserved in the epilogue, Job is commended and rewarded by YHWH in the folktale for speaking “the truth about me” in his pious acceptance of suffering, saying, “Naked came I out of my

5 See also 2 Chron. 28.1 – 5 and 33.1 – 6.

6 See Carrasco, Aztecs 61-77. 61 61 mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD has given and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (42.7, 1.21). This statement seems to suggest a non-retributive worldview in which YHWH gives and takes without regard for righteousness or wickedness. It is more likely the case, however, that the test requires the faithful to trust in the justice of God despite present sufferings, all the while maintaining belief that God will ultimately restore those who remain faithful, as he does in the epilogue. Thus, the divine test motif, as it appears in the prose framework of Job, affirms the doctrine of divine justice. In the text of Job as a whole, however, Job’s poetic protest against the injustice of his suffering is interjected into the framework of the folktale. A number of modern scholars have reasonably argued that this insertion is indicative of the endorsement of Job’s protest by the poet. According to this interpretation, the poetic debate is inserted into the prose framework with the result that Job’s argumentative defiance, moral outrage, and indictment of an unjust god (in stark contrast to his pious acceptance in the prologue) are commended by YHWH as “the truth about me” in the epilogue, while Job’s friends are rebuked by YHWH for defending his actions in their adherence to the doctrine of divine justice and its retributive view of suffering, despite empirical evidence to the contrary (42.7). To this effect, YHWH says to Eliphaz in the epilogue, I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about me as did my servant Job. Now . . . sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. And let Job, my servant, pray for you; for to him I will show favor and not treat you vilely, since you have not spoken the truth about me as did my servant Job. (42.7) 62 62

By means of this clever insertion of the poetry into the prose framework, such scholars argue, the poet suggests that Job’s argumentative and vehemently critical response to unjust suffering is in fact the appropriate response to such circumstances. Furthermore, and perhaps even more remarkably, this insertion would then seem to suggest that such criticism of God is divinely sanctioned. As Safire notes, the text thereby “sanctifies defiance of unjust authority,” “enshrines dissent and demands moral self-reliance,” and “ennobles the admission of ignorance . . . reward[ing] that admission with a promise of ken to come” (225). Perhaps most importantly, he argues, it “reaches across the ages to invite the rest of us to do the same for ourselves” (Safire 225). However, despite the appeal of this interpretation for modern readers, it is sadly negated by YHWH’s rebuke of Job in the poetry and Job’s affirmation of this rebuke in his responses to YHWH. Regardless, the book of Job constitutes a radical alteration of the folktale and a direct challenge to the traditional wisdom response to suffering: the retributive view, which commends pious acceptance of suffering as a sign of one’s unwavering faith in the ultimate justice of God and condemns criticism and protest in response to one’s sufferings, no matter how unjust or senseless their cause. Job’s friends, then, are portrayed not as wise in their adherence to this view, but instead as naïve. In effect, they compound Job’s sufferings by hurling accusations at him like the metaphorical “arrows” of YHWH with which he has been “poisoned”: “For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; / My spirit absorbs their poison; / God’s terrors are arrayed against me” (6.4). Elsewhere, God is explicitly characterized as Job’s “enemy” (13.24), his “foe” (16.10, 19.11), and most heretically as “the wicked one” (19.23), for the claim of YHWH’s omnipotence and sovereignty requires that he be held responsible for wickedness as well as righteousness, as Job notes in the poetry: “When suddenly a scourge brings 63 63 death, / He mocks as the innocent fail. / The earth is handed over to the wicked one; / He covers the eyes of its judges. / If it is not he, then who?” (19.22 – 24). These and numerous similar verses of the debate clearly indicate that Job’s persecutors are not merely his friends, who berate him in the poetry, but also the two divine figures who conspire to torment him in the prologue: YHWH and “the adversary” or “the accuser” (Hebrew: ha-śāṭān) of Job, a kind of divine spy and prosecuting attorney who roams the earth observing human beings and reports to YHWH about their behavior. In the poetry, Job’s friends make themselves accomplices to the injustice perpetrated against him by defending the doctrine of divine retribution in an attempt to justify his sufferings, but it is the adversary (with the consent of the omnipotent YHWH), who causes them. This fact does little to absolve YHWH of moral accountability however. As Crenshaw notes, “Since the adversary is designated as a child of God [Hebrew: ben ĕlōhîm] in the employ of the divine court, the shift in responsibility for ensuing atrocities is slight. Ultimately, God is still at fault” (“Introduction” 11). Similarly, for Breytenbach and Day, “Though he challenges God at a very profound level, he is nonetheless subject to God’s power and, like Yahweh’s messenger in Num. 22, acts on Yahweh’s instructions. He is certainly not an independent, inimical force” (728). Thus, it is only with YHWH’s consent that the adversary, an agent of the divine, is given license to torment Job. His agency is therefore dependent upon the will of YHWH, who initially grants him permission to do anything but harm Job directly (1.12) and later instructs him to afflict Job physically but to spare his life (2.6). Thus, YHWH “imposes certain limits on [the adversary] but nevertheless consents to the experiment” (Soelle 110). Amazingly, even YHWH himself does not deny his culpability, though he attaches blame to the adversary as well, saying to him after the first series of torments, “He [Job] still persists in his integrity, 64 64 although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no good reason,” to which the adversary replies with a second challenge, “But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and flesh and he will curse you to your face,” a statement (in fact, a command) that implies YHWH’s direct responsibility for Job’s suffering (2.3, emphasis added; 2.5, emphasis added). Therefore, there is no question that Job’s suffering is unjust, nor is there any question about who is responsible for causing it, for the reader is privy to information that Job is not: the fact that his suffering is the result of a wager between YHWH and the adversary. Here, the reader sees clearly that Job has been wronged, despite the persistent denial of his friends. Furthermore, the reader is told by the omniscient narrator of the prologue, as well as by YHWH himself, that Job is “blameless and upright,” a fact confirmed in the poetry by his friends before they begin to bombard him with false accusations in an attempt to preserve their worldview at any cost, despite its unsustainability when tested against the evidence of human experience (1.1, 1.8). Thus, let us turn now to the poetic debate, which constitutes the bulk of the text.

The Poetic Debate: Suffering as Divine Injustice Through the experience of personal suffering, Job deduces (in the poetry) that God “destroys the blameless and the guilty” alike (a non-retributive view), for he knows, as the reader does, that he has committed no offense, and yet he is made to endure tremendous, ever-mounting suffering with each additional torment imposed upon him (9.22). In the course of the poetic debate, the poet appropriates the legendary, folkloric figure and adopts the retributive perspective for the purpose of first refuting it in its own terms and then, at the conclusion of poetry, rejecting the conceptual framework of divine justice entirely, thereby espousing a 65 65 converse anti-retributive view. In other words, the poetic dialogue has Job accept the framework of divine justice in order to refute it from within by arguing that God is acting unjustly, a necessary maneuver, as Crenshaw explains, since “Job has no case at all against God apart from an operative principle of reward and retribution, for in a world devoid of such a principle good people have no basis for complaining that the creator has abandoned the helm and thus allows the ship to wander aimlessly amid submerged rocks” (Whirlpool 62). Once one “abandon[s] belief in a moral deity,” Crenshaw notes, “all such claims lose their credibility” (62). At other times, however, Job seeks and hopes for an explanation that might justify his circumstances, whether from his friends or from God (who remains silent until the theophany), only to then systematically refute this view with increasing resentment when his complaints go unanswered. In the poetry, then, instead of piously accepting his fate as he does in the prologue, Job grapples with the problem of suffering at length by means of a creative rhetoric of protest that employs both the poetic language of lamentation and the legal language of indictment. For example, on the one hand, Job expresses a profound sense of abandonment by an absent god, who in one speech “hides his face” in anger, treating Job “like an enemy” (13.24, cf. Ps. 44.23 – 24), and in another remains hidden as Job searches for him in vain (23.3, 8 – 9). On the other hand, Job is overwhelmed by God’s “oppressive presence” that “turns divine providence into celestial harassment” (e.g., 7.17 – 21 and 10.20; Crenshaw 69 and 61n13) and imagines a judicial hearing before this cruel, totalitarian god who is simultaneously judge, jury, and executioner (Crenshaw, Whirlpool). Thus, Crenshaw notes, “Job both complains because god is too near and also grieves over the fact that the deity has withdrawn into the ” (Whirlpool 61). Furthermore, Job professes a longing for a divine arbiter and witness who might 66 66 testify in his defense, attesting to his innocence and vindicating him of all charges hedged against him (16.18 – 16.21; 19.25 – 26; cf. 9.32 – 35). Meanwhile, his friends continue to naïvely rely on the suppositions of the orthodox worldview of the wisdom tradition, uncritically accepting the premise of divine retribution, even while they watch an innocent friend suffer undeservedly. Soelle refers to this retributive understanding of God as a kind of “theological sadism,” for “any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic” (26). The logic of this theology, she explains, “consists of three propositions found in all sadistic theologies: 1) God is the almighty ruler of the world, and he sends all suffering; 2) God acts justly, not capriciously; and 3) all suffering is punishment for sin” (24). Therefore, according to these propositions, it logically follows that because Job is suffering, he must have done something to earn it. This is the precise inference that his friends make. Though the prologue states that they initially visit Job “to console and comfort him,” their persistent professions of this “sadistic” theology, and the retributive view of suffering that follows from it, fail to provide either comfort or consolation (2.11). Instead, Job’s “mischievous comforters” multiply his wounds by adding persecution to his affliction, castigating him and fabricating false accusations against him (16.2). Thus, he criticizes them for their abuse, saying, “How long will you grieve my spirit, / And crush me with words? / Time and again you humiliate me, / And are not ashamed to abuse me” (19.2 – 3). But first, the poetry begins with a powerful lament by Job as he sits in ashes, scratching his leprous flesh with a potsherd (2.8). His flesh is “covered with maggots and clods of earth,” and his skin “broken and festering” (7.5). In this lament, Job “curse[s] the day of his birth,” praying for a reversal of creation by employing metaphors of light and darkness, a possible allusion to God’s 67 67 separation of light from darkness in the cosmogonic narrative of Genesis 1.1 – 2.3 (vv. 1.3 – 5), in which he creates the heavens and the earth through the power of speech alone, proclaiming “Let there be light” (1.3). Thus, Job proclaims, “Perish the day on which I was born, / . . . / May that day be darkness [i.e., “Let there be darkness”]; / May God have no concern for it; / May light not shine on it; / May darkness and deep gloom reclaim it” (3.3 – 5). Here, Job prays for a reversal of his birth, and thus an undoing of his suffering, through the metaphor of a return to the time of darkness before creation. Even here, at the very outset of the poetry, Job’s words are a far cry from the patient Job of the prose folktale. Job continues his lament, adding, “Why did I not die at birth, / Expire as I came forth from the womb? / Why were there knees to receive me, / Or breasts for me to suck? / For now I would be lying in repose, asleep and at rest, / With the world’s kings and counselors who rebuild ruins for themselves, / . . . / Or why was I not like a buried stillbirth, / like babies who never saw the light? / . . . / Small and great alike are there, / And the slave is free of his master.” (3.11 – 19) Here, Job construes death as a welcome, liberating event, rather than an unpleasant, destructive one, because it brings “repose” and “rest” to the weary. It frees the slave from his master and, by analogy, would free Job too from his torment at the hands of a cruel, divine master. Furthermore, Job here espouses a non-retributive view in the assertion that all people, “small and great alike,” are ultimately destined for the same fate: to become food for worms in the grave, a truth that he makes explicit elsewhere, as evidenced by the following example: One man dies in robust health, / All tranquil and untroubled; / . . . / Another dies 68 68 embittered, / Never having tasted happiness. / They both lie in the dust / And are covered with worms” (21.23 – 26). Even mighty “kings and counselors,” he muses, despite all of their worldly wealth and status, rebuild the ruins of yesterday in vain, only to die tomorrow, leaving them to crumble to dust like their builders. With this evocative image, the poet renders an effective analogy for human ephemerality, for just as manmade ruins return to the dust out of which they were fashioned, so too the God-made men, “formed . . . from the dust of the earth” (Gen. 2.7), who build and rebuild those ruins for naught. Thus, there is a realistic wisdom in Job’s lament, in addition to his cry of and his solemn for the comforting embrace of death to relieve him of his misery. To this lament, Eliphaz replies with an affirmation of the traditional wisdom perspective, reminding Job that the world operates according to divine justice: “Think now, what innocent man ever perished? / Where have the upright been destroyed? / As I have seen, those who plow evil / and sow mischief reap them. / They perish by a blast from God” (4.7 – 9). Here, as elsewhere, there is no question that God is the source of suffering, but it is clear that suffering is not inflicted arbitrarily. Rather, it is inflicted as a form of punishment in direct correspondence to one’s behavior. As elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, suffering is here understood as an instrument of divine retribution. While this view may have promoted ethical behavior among the ancient Israelite community, and may have provided a source of comfort by fostering a sense of divinely mandated order and justice amid the often uncontrollable ills of the world, it also served to stigmatize and alienate those who suffer, as evidenced by the case of Job. Furthermore, Eliphaz adds, all are guilty to a greater or lesser degree, though they may consider themselves innocent, for “Evil does not grow out of the 69 69 soil, / Nor does mischief spring from the ground; / For man is born to [do] mischief, / Just as sparks fly upward” (5.6 – 7). Here, the text presents an analogy in which the latter claim affirms the former: Where there is fire, sparks will always fly upward; by analogy, where there are human beings, there will always be “mischief” (the KJV and NRSV translations use the word “trouble”), and, as a result, divine retribution as recompense for that mischief. Therefore, Eliphaz argues, some degree of suffering at the hands of God is inevitable, so the best that can be done is to plead one’s case before him while maintaining faith in his mercy. It is in this manner that he advises Job, saying, “I would resort to God; / I would lay my case before God, / . . . / See how happy is the man whom God reproves; / Do not deject the discipline of the Almighty. / He inures, but he binds up; / He wounds, but his hands heal” (5.8 – 18). Not persuaded by this advice, Job replies with continued resentment: Would that my request were granted, / That God gave me what I wished for; / Would that God consented to crush me, / . . . / Then this would be my consolation, / As I writhed in unsparing pains: / That I did not suppress my words against the Holy One. / What strength have I, that I should endure? / How long have I to live, that I should be patient? / Is my strength the strength of rock? / Is my flesh bronze? / Truly, I cannot help myself; / I have been deprived of resourcefulness. (6.8 – 13) Here again, Job explicitly identifies God as the source of his suffering and affirms his prayer for death as a remedy for his misery. He refuses to suppress his words, for though he may be “crushed” by God, his integrity would be his consolation. While his friends see only heresy in Job’s words, Job finds virtue in protest, for he refuses to speak falsely in the sight of God and refuses to suppress 70 70 his arguments against him. Thus, he later proclaims, “I insist on arguing with God,” while his friends “invent lies,” speaking “unjustly” and “deceitfully on God’s behalf” (13.3 – 7). Finally, Job here adds that the severity of his suffering has deprived him of his resolve and thus rendered him incapable of patience. His pain is too acute to be borne in silence and therefore must be given vent in a courageous outcry of protest. To this effect, he later adds, “I will not speak with restraint; / I will give voice to the anguish of my spirit; / I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (7.11). He proceeds to do precisely that throughout the debate, vividly cataloguing the crimes of God. For example: In his anger he tears and persecutes me; / He gnashes his teeth at me; / My foe stabs me with his eyes. / . . . / I had been untroubled and he broke me in pieces; / He took me by the scruff and shattered me; / He set me up as his target; / . . . / He pierced my kidneys; he showed no mercy; / . . . / My face is red with weeping. (16.8 – 16) And again: Yet know that God has wronged me; / . . . / I cry “Violence!” but am not answered; / I shout, but can get no justice. / . . . / He has laid darkness upon my path. / He has stripped me of my glory, / . . . / He tears down every part of me; I perish; / He uproots my hope like a tree. / He kindles his anger against me; / He regards me as one of his foes. (19.6 – 11) Like Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar also reply to Job with arguments in defense of God, for they too refuse to admit that an innocent person might be made to suffer unjustly or that an “evildoer” might be brought to prosperity in a world that they believe is ordered by divine justice. To this effect, Bildad states, 71 71

“Surely God does not despise the blameless; / He gives no support to evildoers” (8.20). First, he argues that Job’s children must have committed some offense against God unbeknownst to him. Therefore, he advises Job to “supplicate the Almighty,” saying, “Will God pervert the right? / Will the Almighty pervert justice? / If your sons sinned against him, / He dispatched them for their transgression. / But if you seek God / And supplicate the Almighty, / If you are pure and upright, / He will protect you” (8.1 – 6). On the contrary, Job has been “pure and upright” all along, and it has earned him nothing but pain. Next, Zophar accuses Job himself of wrongdoing and instructs him to reach out to God in repentance: “And know that God has overlooked for you some of your iniquity. / . . . / But if you direct your mind, / And spread forth your hands toward him / . . . / You will then put your misery out of mind / . . . / You will be secure, for there is hope” (11.1 – 18). At this point, the arguments of Job’s friends, though misguided, are expressed with the best of intentions. Soon, however, they become increasingly hostile, as Job’s comforters become, like the divine śāṭān, his adversaries and accusers. For example, Eliphaz exclaims in an accusatory tone, “You subvert piety / And restrain prayer to God. / Your sinfulness dictates your speech, / So you choose crafty language. / Your own mouth condemns you, not I; / Your lips testify against you” (15.4 – 6). Perhaps it is due to anxiety, whether conscious or unconscious, about the implications of the upheaval of their worldview that prevents Job’s friends from accepting its falsity. For these men, the overturning of the wisdom view of the world (a just cosmos controlled by a just and omnipotent god) constitutes the collapse of the very “ground on which life was built, the primal trust in the world’s reliability” (Soelle 86). Perhaps it is for this reason that they insist upon clinging 72 72 to this worldview, even at the cost of abandoning their loyalty to a friend, whom they proceed to defame and slander without cause during the course of the debate, knowing full well that he is innocent of all charges but attempting nonetheless to coerce him into reaffirming the just order of the retributive worldview by falsely confessing guilt and repenting. Crenshaw explains the friends’ behavior in similar terms, as follows: Their faith requires them to prove that Job has committed some awful crime, for his calamity called for precisely this conclusion. That is why their tolerance gradually fades, and open accusation replaces subtle hints. Earlier appeals to Job’s nobility of character give way to one primary concern, and that is to vindicate themselves. In the process a decisive shift occurs; whereas the friends were at the outset genuinely interested in helping Job return to his former state, in the end their consuming passion was to justify themselves. This recognizable change explains why Job came to identify the three friends as agents of the enemy, in this instance, God. (Whirlpool 70) In direct contrast to his friends’ self-assured affirmation of the retributive view, Job counters these arguments by pointing out the unfairness that exists in the world and employing this evidence to question the “knowledge” (i.e., wisdom) of God’s judgment: Why do the wicked live on, / Prosper and grow wealthy? / Their children are with them always, / And they see their children’s children. / Their homes are secure, without fear; / They do not feel the rod of God. / . . . / They spend their days in happiness, / And go down to Sheol in peace. / . . . / Can God be instructed in knowledge, / He who judges from such heights? (21.7 – 22) 73 73

Here, the general prosperity of the wicked is strikingly contrasted with the suffering of Job. The wicked “prosper and grow wealthy,” while Job has lost everything. The children of the wicked are “always with them, and they see their children’s children,” in direct contrast to Job, whose children have been callously murdered by YHWH and the adversary. Eliphaz replies to Job’s rhetorical questions with further accusations and questions of his own: “Is it because of your piety that he [God] arraigns you, / And enters into judgment with you? / You know that your wickedness is great, / And that your iniquities have no limit. / . . . / Therefore snares are all around you, / And sudden terrors frighten you” (22.4 – 10). The argument intensifies as Job counters these false accusations with evidence of his righteousness, and then proceeds to contrast this righteousness with the misfortune that has plagued him despite his exemplary behavior: “Did I not weep for the unfortunate? / Did I not grieve for the needy? / I looked forward to good fortune, but evil came; / I hoped for light, but darkness came; / . . . / Days of misery confront me. / I walk about in sunless gloom” (30.20 – 30). In addition to his criticism of God and his arguments against the claims of his friends, Job rebukes his friends as well, and with equal vigor, for their lack of loyalty and support during his time of need. Thus, he challenges them, saying, “Teach me; I shall be silent; / Tell me where I am wrong. / . . . / Now be so good as to face me; / I will not lie to your face. / Relent! Let there not be injustice; / Relent! I am still in the right. / Is injustice on my tongue?” (6.24 – 30). And again: “Will you speak unjustly on God’s behalf? / Will you speak deceitfully for him? / . . . / Your briefs are empty platitudes; / Your responses are unsubstantial” (13.2 – 12). Elsewhere, he desperately pleads with them for compassion, exclaiming, “Pity me, pity me! You are my friends; / For the hand of God has struck me! / Why do 74 74 you pursue me like God, / Maligning me insatiably?” (19.21 – 2). Furthermore, Job understands that divine wisdom cannot be acquired from other human beings, particularly those who speak with naïve, self-assured dogmatism about things beyond their reach, things that they could not possibly understand any more than he can. Thus, he says to them, “What you know, I know also; / I am not less than you” (19.2). Perhaps most strikingly, Job also speaks directly to God, indicting with tremendous poetic power the one who is both his creator and destroyer, as in the following examples: “You frighten me with dreams, / And terrify me with visions, / Till I prefer strangulation, / Death, to my wasted frame. / I am sick of it. / I shall not live forever; / Let me be, for my days are a breath” (7.14 – 16). “Your hands shaped and fashioned me, / Then destroyed every part of me. / . . . / Should I be guilty—the worse for me! / And even when innocent, I cannot lift my head; / So sated am I with shame, / And drenched in misery” (10.8 – 15). “Why did you let me come out of the womb? / Better I had expired before any eye saw me, / Had I been as though I never was, / Had I been carried from the womb to the grave. / My days are few, so desist! / Leave me alone” (10.18 – 20). “Mountains collapse and crumble; / Rocks are dislodged from their place. / Water wears away stone; / Torrents wash away earth; / So you destroy man’s hope, / You overpower him forever and he perishes; / . . . / He feels only the pain of his flesh, / And his spirit mourns in him” (14.18 – 22). Furthermore, Job protests the unfairness of his circumstances, for how can he, a mere human being, call the divine to account for his crimes? Moreover, who can he appeal to, but God himself, who is his persecutor? Therefore, Job has no recourse other than protest against a cruel, omnipotent, and hidden god: 75 75

Man cannot win a suit against God. / . . . / Who ever challenged him and came out whole? / . . . / He snatches away—Who can stop him? / Who can say to him, “What are you doing?” / God does not restrain his anger; / . . . / If I summoned him and he responded, / I do not believe he would lend me his ear. / For he crushes me with a storm, / He wounds me much for no cause. / He does not let me catch my breath, / But sates me with bitterness. / In a trial of strength—he is the strong one; / . . . / Though I were blameless, he would prove me crooked. (9.2 – 24) The vitriol with which Job indicts God throughout the poetry can be understood as an exemplary case of “misotheism” (from the Greek μῖσος, meaning “hatred,” and ϑεóς, meaning “god”), a phenomenon that Bernard Schweizer defines as “hatred of God” or “enmity toward God.” Schweizer interprets this “antagonistic faith” as a “response to suffering, injustice, and disorder in a troubled world” (2, 8). “Misotheists,” he writes, “feel that humanity is the object of divine carelessness or sadism, and they question God’s love for humanity,” though without entirely rejecting belief in his existence (8). According to Schweizer, this distinct philosophical position is characterized by “anti-God rhetoric” and is typically adopted on moral grounds from within the framework of a theistic belief system (2). It is distinct from , he explains, “since the hostility to God obviously presumes the existence of God,” nor can it be equated with Satanism, “since opposition to God doesn’t automatically lead to reverence for God’s adversary” (1). In his research, Schweizer found that “the most immediate effect of God-hatred is on the misotheist himself, for whom it serves a therapeutic function. Although seemingly directed at the figure of God,” he contends, “misotheism reflects a passionate concern for the affairs of man,” as it 76 76 does in the case of Job, who rails against undeserved suffering and insists on justice for the sufferer (8). Schweizer identifies three distinct types of misotheism, which he calls “agonistic misotheism,” “absolute misotheism,” and “political misotheism” (17- 20). These three categories, he explains, are “unified by their shared opposition to God,” but remain “distinctly dissimilar in the way they approach their subject and in the way they conceive of their ultimate project” (19). The first of these types (agonistic misotheism) is “characterized by an ongoing internal struggle and by the agony over one’s negative relationship with God” (18, 17). “Torn between hope and despair,” these misotheists struggle with “the understanding that God is not entirely competent and good, while resenting the need to praise and worship him” (17). Moreover, and most importantly, they “wish that they were wrong in their negative assessment of the deity and would prefer God to be benevolent and caring after all,” but suffer from an “inability to believe in a good god” due to the empirical evidence of their own experience (17). He goes on to explain this perspective in terms strikingly reminiscent of Job: Their case against God is based on personal experience . . . which [has] taught them that the universe is not well ordered and could therefore not reflect some divinely ideal plan. Something has gone wrong with the universe, they argue, if millions of pious believers can be slaughtered without the slightest trace of divine intervention, if remain consistently unheard, and if personal indignity and suffering come down on good people without explanation or rationale. (17) Perhaps most tellingly, Schweizer notes, “Their persistent provocation could be seen as a form of prayer, [for] they believe enough to keep trying,” as 77 77 does Job, who repeatedly attempts to provoke God into responding to his cries. For example, he states, I say to God, ‘Do not condemn me; / Let me know what you charge me with. / Does it benefit you to defraud, / To despise the toil of your hands, / While smiling on the counsel of the wicked? / . . . / You know that I am not guilty, / And that there is none to deliver from your hand. (10.1 – 7) Schweizer rightly associates Job with this, the first of the three aforementioned categories (agonistic misotheism), but considers him disqualified from inclusion based upon his response to the theophany: “These [agonistic] misotheists infallibly identify with the biblical figure of Job, although they do not follow the pattern of Job’s wrestling with God, insofar as his temporary rebellion with God is followed by meek acceptance of divine supremacy” (17). Here, Schweizer suggests that Job’s final submission negates the argument of the poetry by reducing Job’s defiant speeches of protest to a mere “temporary rebellion.” On the contrary, the poetic Job constitutes a powerful and resonant voice in the history of dissent, despite his eventual submission. By applying Schweizer’s definition of misotheism to the case of Job, the poet’s project becomes abundantly clear: to challenge the orthodoxy and its tyrannical god in metaphorical terms, using the bold “anti-God rhetoric” characteristic of agonistic misotheism. In doing so, he wages a poetic assault on this theology in favor of an alternative understanding of both God and suffering. Thus, Job’s protest is nothing less than an articulation of “conflicted faith,” expressed through a critique of the doctrine of divine justice and the reductive theology that follows from it. This conflicted faith is evidenced, for example, by the following passage, in which Job attempts to reach out to God, seeking comfort 78 78 but finding instead only cruelty and harassment: “I cry out to you, but you do not answer me; / I wait, but you do not consider me. / You have become cruel to me; / With your powerful hand you harass me. / . . . / I know you will bring me to death” (30.20 – 30). During his indictment of YHWH, Job cries out for an arbiter and a witness to his innocence, imagining one who will advocate for him and testify in his defense against the false charges of iniquity hedged against him: “Earth, do not cover my blood; / Let there be no resting place for my outcry! / Surely now my witness is in heaven; / He who can testify for me is on high. / . . . / Let him arbitrate between a man and God / As between a man and his fellow” (16.18 – 16.21; cf. 9.32 – 35). Furthermore, Job envisions a gō’ēl (an “avenger” or a “redeemer”) who will vindicate him (and possibly avenge his death) in the future, saying, “I know that my vindicator [Hebrew: gō’ēl] lives; / In the end he will testify on earth— / This after my skin will have been peeled off” (19.21 – 6). Here, as Gruber explains, the Hebrew noun gō’ēl is a “legal term for the person in the family responsible for avenging the murder of other members (Num. 35.19; Deut. 19.6).” Thus, “Job is not speaking about God but rather about a future kinsman who will vindicate him, who will take revenge on God for what God has done to Job” (Jewish Study Bible 1529n5).7 According to Crenshaw, the cultural- historical background informing this figure “would seem to be the Sumerian idea of a who looked after the well-being of devotees,” rather than a literal avenger responsible for carrying out lex talionis, the “law of retribution” (Whirlpool 74n38).

7 See also Ewert 68. 79 79

Soelle extrapolates from this figure an interpretation of Job’s wish for vengeance as a longing for a different kind of god who is neither the cruel tyrant implied by the advice of Job’s wife nor the totalitarian judge asserted by his friends. Instead, she explains, Job cries out for a god who stands by the side of those who suffer, a god of the oppressed and persecuted, not unlike the god of the Exodus, who had delivered the Israelites from bondage and led them out of Egypt: The God of the exodus is not one who imposes affliction and then, with equal arbitrariness, removes it again [as he does in Job’s prose framework]. The affliction is explained completely in rational terms. It stems from force employed by the Egyptians, who fear being supplanted by the ever-increasing numbers of Israelites. God has nothing to do with this suffering—aside from being on the side of the wronged. . . . The God of the exodus was himself the answer to the experience of oppression. (109) While there is much to admire in this interpretation, it should be noted that the god of liberation who figures in the Exodus myth is also a god of wrath, who inflicts horrendous punishments on human beings, both Egyptian and Israelite throughout the Pentateuch (and indeed, on the entire world during the global flood of Gen. 6–9). The comparison that Soelle establishes is useful for another reason, however, for in it the god of the book of Job is analogous to the pharaoh of the Exodus. He is not one who sides with those oppressed and persecuted but one who deals out oppression and persecution, and then berates the sufferer for complaining about his unjust treatment, intimidating him with a frightening display of power. As Crenshaw notes, here, “the champion of oppressed people” has not only “ignored the desperate plea for help” but has become “like an enemy” to Job (Whirlpool 71). This is why Job’s eventual submission, which concludes the 80 80 poetry, is so perplexing, even incredible, to modern readers. In Soelle’s words, “that Job at the conclusion of the book submits himself to this power-being who dwells beyond good and evil is incredible because it is intolerable” (118). In Soelle’s view, in accordance with the traditional Christian interpretation of the gō’ēl, Job’s longing for an advocate utterly unlike the murderous god who has killed his children and afflicted him with disease is ultimately fulfilled in the figure of Christ, who endures crucifixion as a public display of the type of divinity that he represents, a graphic symbol of the suffering god: “Job’s call for the advocate, the redeemer, the blood-avenger and blood-satisfier is to be understood only as the unanswered cry of the pre-Christian world, which finds its answer in Christ. Job is stronger than the old God. Not the one who causes suffering but only the one who suffers can answer Job” (119). According to this interpretation, the crucified Christ too (like the god of the Exodus) is “on the side of the wronged,” the side of the oppressed rather than the oppressor, of the tortured rather than the torturer (109). Thus, Soelle emphasizes not God the Father, with the problematic orthodox theological claims of his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence, nor on the celestial Son (the second hypostasy of the and the disembodied “Word” of God, a mere abstraction). Instead, she places it upon Jesus the man, who suffered and died upon the cross not for the absolution of original sin, but in a public display of solidarity with those who suffer. In other words, she emphasizes the humanity of Christ, rather than the claim of his divinity: “Wherever people suffer,” she writes, “Christ stands with them. To put it in less mythological terms, as long as Christ lives and is remembered, his friends will be those who suffer. Where no help is possible, he appears not as the superior helper [the omnipotent God of miraculous intervention] but only as the one who walks with those beyond 81 81 help” (177). Thus, in Soelle’s view, the true nature of God is not revealed through power but through suffering. This god of liberation theology is nowhere featured in the book of Job, however, for in it “God appears to Job as God of creation and nature and not God of history who ‘brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt’” (Kepnes 50). As Steven Kepnes explains, this “God of creation does not intervene in history to repair its injustices,” nor does he “erase the pain and cruelty of human suffering” (50). He is an apathetic god, insensitive to human suffering. By contrast, Soelle’s god, then, is akin to the imagined gō’ēl whom Job believes will side with him and stand in his defense against his persecutors. He is a god who shares the burden of affliction. He is the consoler and comforter who suffers alongside those in need. In Girard’s view as well, Christ is the figure who shatters for all time the “sinister old theological rubbish” of the doctrine of divine reward and punishment, presenting a new kind of God (that is, a new theology), which he identifies with the paraclete (from the Greek παράκλητος, signifying an “advocate,” “helper,” “comforter,” or “consoler”) of the gospel of John, a figure known to the Christian tradition as the “,” the third hypostasy of the Trinity (“Job as Failed Scapegoat” 204).8 Despite the implication of religious triumphalism inherent in this Christocentric perspective, and its anachronistic retrojection of Christ into a text that predates Christianity by centuries, there is nonetheless something to be commended in its emphasis on compassion and social justice rather than power. Indeed, the principle of radical non-violent resistance preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5 – 7) has been employed to revolutionary historical effect by such notable civil rights activists as Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi and

8 See also Girard, Job the Victim. 82 82

Martin Luther King, Jr. The ethical demands and social justice rhetoric of certain of the Hebrew prophets (such as Amos and Isaiah) were also employed by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his own speeches of protest millennia later. As I have attempted to demonstrate, throughout the poetic debate, the poet effectively refutes the doctrine of divine justice presented by the prose through a sophisticated rhetoric that combines the poetic language of lament and the legal language of indictment, along with the anti-God rhetoric of the misotheist in what is arguably its earliest extant manifestation, though certain antecedent ancient Near Eastern texts (of the sort mentioned in chapter 2) may qualify as earlier examples. Furthermore, the tension produced by the juxtaposition of the prose and the poetry constitutes an effective rhetorical strategy that evokes sympathy (lit. “feeling/suffering together/with,” from the Greek σύν + πάϑος) in the reader as Job’s moral outrage becomes the reader’s own. By means of this juxtaposition, the poet enables the reader to see, indisputably, that the doctrine of divine justice is demonstrably false, as evidenced by the case of Job, and, by extension, the case of any and every individual who has ever been unjustly robbed of his or her livelihood, loved ones, health, or life “for no good reason.” The case of Job speaks especially to anyone who, like Job, has endured oppression at the cruel hands of an apathetic authority figure (or authoritarian institution) who wields absolute power with little to no regard for the suffering that his actions cause, for this is precisely the role of YHWH in the book of Job. This realization has led David Robertson to proclaim in response to the text, “While God may be more powerful than we are, he is beneath us on scales that measure love, justice, and wisdom. So we know of him what we know of all tyrants, that while they may torture us and finally kill us, they cannot destroy our personal integrity. From that we take our comfort” (qtd. in Safire 81). 83 83

It is this personal integrity that Job maintains throughout the poetic debate. Amid accusations of guilt, he refuses either to repent or to utter a false confession and eventually swears an oath of honesty, evoking his persecutor in the process: “By God who has deprived me of justice! / By Shaddai who has embittered my life! / As long as there is life in me, / And God’s breath is in my nostrils, / My lips will speak no wrong, / Nor my tongue utter deceit. / . . . / Until I die I will maintain my integrity / I persist in my righteousness and will not yield” (27.3 – 6). Here, Job is indeed stronger than God. Though YHWH may be omnipotent, and thus infinitely more powerful than Job, Job’s power is his integrity, for he is in the right (ethically speaking) and no matter how much YHWH evokes during the theophany, no amount of dread or wonder can alter the fact that Job is innocent and has been made to suffer unjustly at the hands of God, as the prologue makes explicit. In this respect, the poetic Job admirably suggests that the ethical demands of justice are of a higher order than the laws of either man or god. Furthermore, he insists upon holding God to this standard of ethical behavior, even at the risk of being “crushed” or “slain” by him in retaliation (6.9, 9.17, 13.14). For example, Job proclaims in the poetry, “I will have my say, / Come what may upon me. / He may well slay me; I may have no hope; / Yet I will argue my case before him. / In this too is my : / That no impious man can come into his presence” (13.13 – 6). Thus, the measure of Job’s piety, evidenced by YHWH’s appearance before him, is not his acceptance of unjust suffering in the prologue but his adamant refusal to accept it in the poetry, even at the hands of God. In this context, Job’s relationship with God is not that of a dictatorship, in which God’s word is law and any dissenting voices are silenced by means of force. Instead, it is a relationship in which God’s behavior is subject to criticism 84 84 by those whom he has created and thus bears responsibility for, regardless of whether he chooses to accept or neglect that responsibility. As Safire notes, this criticism of God is the means by which Job “shattered hypocrisy and rigidity and replaced all that with an idea of his own about proper conduct in pain” (87). “When Job’s integrity was insulted by unfair affliction,” Safire writes, “he did more than dissent; he rightly indicted God’s management, impugned God’s motive, and criticized God’s aloofness” (88). However, this type of divine-human relationship, in which God is subject to the testing of human beings as well, is complicated by the theophany and its rhetoric of absolute power.

The Theophany: The Cosmocentric Perspective and the Mystery of Suffering The theophany begins when YHWH appears in the form of a violent storm and rebukes Job harshly, saying, “Who is this who darkens counsel, / Speaking without knowledge? / Gird your loins like a man; / I will ask and you will inform me” (38.2 – 3). Despite his later restoration of Job in the epilogue, here YHWH clearly challenges Job’s poetic claims and seems intent on silencing him through intimidation. By proclaiming that Job “darkens counsel, speaking without knowledge” (the absence of light here serving as a metaphor for ignorance), YHWH emphasizes Job’s inability to see the true nature of both God and cosmos from within the confines of his limited perspective, from his “worm’s-eye vantage point in dust and ashes” (38.1; Lasine 153). Thus, YHWH suggests that Job’s statements about him have in fact been incorrect all along, in both the prose and the poetry. Similarly, he rebukes the friends in the epilogue for speaking untruths about him. Therefore, YHWH points out the error of both the claims of divine justice espoused by Job’s friends as well as the claims of divine injustice asserted by Job in the poetry, commending neither view. Instead, the speeches of the 85 85 theophany suggest that the dualistic conceptual framework of justice and injustice within which the poetic debate occurs is a false dichotomy that is inapplicable to God, who is neither moral nor immoral, neither just nor unjust. The theophany instead implies that God is amoral and “ajust” (i.e., neither just nor unjust), existing outside of the conceptual sphere of moral judgment. The poet here suggests that though God’s behavior may appear immoral and unjust from mankind’s anthropocentric perspective, which projects its own psyche onto the mind of God, human conceptions of morality and justice fail to reflect the true nature of the deity, who is a transcendent intelligence that exists (like Nietzsche’s Übermensch) “beyond good and evil” and is therefore not subject to such anthropic categorical constructs. This transcendent deity is the familiar deus absconditus, the “hidden god” unknowable by the limited faculties of the human mind. Job thus comes to realize, as a result of the theophany, that his previous understanding of god (as either a just or an unjust ruler) was mistaken. As Crenshaw explains, “His [Job’s] bitter experience has taught him in no uncertain terms that God does not reward virtue or punish vice in every instance” (Whirlpool 74). Therefore, despite the courage and integrity of his impassioned speeches of protest, which continue to resonate powerfully with modern readers, it is Job’s eventual acceptance of this alternative theology (the understanding of god as a transcendent, amoral, and ajust deity rather than an anthropopathic one) that earns him commendation and reward in the epilogue.9 On this point, it will perhaps prove useful to turn to the work of John T. Wilcox, who has effectively elucidated the theophany by means of an insightful and nuanced analysis.

9 On the variety of biblical approaches to rendering literary images of God (naturalistic, anthropomorphic, anthropopathic, Christocentric, transcendent, and the like), see Holbrook. 86 86

Wilcox sees the poet reconciling the “honest, heroic ” of Job’s “bitterness” by means of the theophany, isolating three prevalent themes within it that illuminate the text from a philosophical perspective (186). First, he sees the theophany reminding Job of humankind’s ignorance about the mysteries of existence, and rejecting the orthodox doctrine of the “Moral World Order” (the doctrine of divine justice) defended by Job’s friends. Thus, he rightly notices a “partial skepticism” that presents a “dichotomy between what we can know [the falsity of the orthodox doctrine] and what we cannot know [‘the deepest truths of nature or of God’]” (186, emphasis in original). From this revelation, Wilcox explains, Job acquires “intellectual humility” (184). Second, YHWH’s “language of power” reminds Job of humankind’s “weakness,” his relative lack of power and his inability to control nature. Third, YHWH’s praise of nature (in which little mention is made of humankind) enables Job to envision the beauty and immensity of creation, to see it from a cosmocentric perspective rather than an anthropocentric one. Finally, Wilcox sees Job’s reward in the epilogue as symbolic of the peace that his intellectual humility brings, an “acceptance analogous to his traditional patience” (99). Wilcox’s analysis is as lucid an of the theophany as can be produced. The speeches of YHWH from “out of the tempest,” a concrete symbol of the awesome destructive power of both God and nature, affirm Job’s rejection of the conventional wisdom by emphasizing the “small worth” of humankind in their praise of the immensity of creation and the tremendous power of nature (38.1, 40.6, 40.4). YHWH emphasizes Job’s ignorance and powerlessness by juxtaposing them with his own cosmic knowledge and seemingly limitless power. Rather than responding to either Job’s arguments or questions, he asserts Job’s lack of knowledge with a series of seemingly arbitrary and irrelevant questions 87 87 that Job is unable to answer. For example, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” (38.4), “Have you ever commanded the day to break?” (38.12), “Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea?” (38.16), “Have the gates of death been disclosed to you?” (38.17), “Have you surveyed the expanses of the earth?” (38.18), “Do you know the laws of heaven?” (38.33), “Have you an arm like God’s? / Can you thunder with a voice like his?” (40.9), and so on. At this point, the reader imagines Job either frightened into submission by YHWH’s rhetoric of power and intimidation or left dumbfounded by his whirlwind of seemingly irrelevant questions and his failure or neglect to address any of Job’s complaints. Remarkably, however, Job’s perspective is effectively altered by the theophany, and he attains a new understanding of God and the experience of suffering as a result. Despite YHWH’s chastisement of Job, the fact that he appears at all is significant. Applying a distinction by between theology and religious experience, Kushner notes that Job has, at this point, “evolved from . . . discussing God to encountering God,” contending that it is the contact of the theophany, rather than its content, that engenders the shift in perspective that effectively resolves Job’s complaints (Book of Job 157). Perhaps Job has indeed found comfort in the contact of his deity, as Kushner argues, though this is difficult to imagine, given the fact that the nature of that contact consists less of a paternal embrace than a challenge by a slighted opponent. Instead, I contend that Job has come to understand, through his experience of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the “fearful and fascinating mystery,” which inspires awe and dread in equal measure), that his previous assertions about God 88 88 were mistaken, as were those of his friends.10 Job learns that God’s true nature is neither just nor unjust, but rather amoral and ajust. Thus, he finds contentment in the mystery of both God and suffering, in the fact that his god in not punishing him unfairly as he had previously believed. Furthermore, he finds a modicum of peace of mind by accepting the incomprehensibility of his circumstances, rather than struggling against them, as evidenced by his final response to YHWH, in which he states, “Indeed, I spoke without understanding / Of things beyond me, which I did not know. / . . . / I had heard you with my ears, / But now I see you with my eyes; / Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust and ashes” (42.3). Job here acknowledges that he had heard about God, via the conventional theology of the wisdom tradition, but has now “seen” the majesty of God in the awe- inspiring power of nature and the immensity of creation evoked by the theophany. It should be noted here that the Hebrew is notoriously ambiguous in these most significant of verses, allowing for multiple (often contradictory) interpretations, as Kushner discusses at length, calling the passage “untranslatable with any degree of certainty” (Book of Job 157-61). He does point out, however, that the final phrase “ f r v’efer” literally means “dust and ashes” and “is a recognizable biblical phrase signifying insignificance,” citing examples of its use elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (157-8). Therefore, if Job’s submission is to be considered genuine rather than either sarcastic or ironic (as I contend that it is), then he is indeed admitting his own insignificance, as his prior response (in which he says, “See, I am of small worth”) also suggests. Similarly, in the phrase here translated as “I recant and relent” (signified by the Hebrew verbs ’em’ s and nihamti), he is confessing not only the insufficiency of the conceptual framework

10 On the numinous, see Otto. 89 89 of divine justice to reflect the true nature of the divine, but also the inability of human beings to comprehend either the divine nature or the ever-elusive meaning of suffering (42.3).11 Therefore, he is humbled by the theophany, saying, “See, I am of small worth,” much in the same way that a modern thinker may be humbled by gazing up at the vastness of the night-sky and contemplating the immensity of the universe with its myriad stars, each a distant sun equivalent to the radiant heart of our own solar system, a universe in which the earth is but a “pale blue dot” (to borrow a phrase from the late Carl Sagan) (40.4). Crenshaw understands Job’s submission as an attempt at theodicy, an act that compromises Job’s integrity. In other words, he sees it as a defense of God at the expense of human dignity: “In a real sense,” Crenshaw writes, “Job’s silent submission before an awesome display of power amounts to a loss of integrity, [and] hence may rightly be termed an argument against humanity” (“Introduction” 6). Furthermore, Crenshaw sees this trend manifested throughout the Hebrew Bible, with the effect of self-denigration and the internalization of guilt among its authors: Such salvaging of God’s honor by sacrificing human integrity eventuated in a grandiose interpretation of history that amounts to a monumental theodicy. This Deuteronomistic theology justifies national setbacks and political oppression as divine punishment for sin. The portrayal of Israel and Judah as corrupt to the core suffices to justify divine abandonment of the chosen people, but such rescuing of God’s sovereignty and freedom was purchased at a high price, the self-esteem of humans. This tendency to save God’s honor

11 See Kushner, Book of Job 158-60 and Mitchell xxxiin5. 90 90

by sacrificing human integrity seems to have caught on in ancient Israel, for every effort at theodicy represents a substantial loss of human dignity. (7) Crenshaw’s view is bold and his analysis of the general psychology of “Old Testament” theodicy is, in my estimation, correct, but it should be noted that the emphasis in the book of Job hinges on what the poet considers to be an incorrect understanding of God in the poetic debate and the forging of a new theology represented by Job’s humble responses to the theophany. While this new theology may indeed serve as a defense of God by transforming the experience of suffering into an insoluble mystery, YHWH still cannot escape the claims of injustice presented by Job’s protest, for the wager of the prologue renders any attempt at theodicy null and void. For this reason, it is not Job’s responses to YHWH but his poetic speeches of protest that speak to the modern world and remain as relevant as ever in their depiction of the courageous resistance of one man in the face of terrible oppression.

Conclusions For the poet-author of Job, his righteous gentile protagonist stands in as a representative of the entirety of humankind. Thus, his ignorance, his powerlessness, and also his moral outrage at the unfairness of his suffering are analogous to our own. Job is the universal voice of protest made text, a resounding cry for liberation from suffering, whether at the oppressive hands of a cruel, authoritarian power figure or as a result of indiscriminate, deterministic forces of nature that inflict suffering senselessly and without warning. In either case, the book of Job presents a number of differing perspectives on the phenomenon of suffering. In the folktale of Job the Patient, preserved in the 91 91 prose narrative framework, suffering comes as a test of faith, as it does in the akedah of Genesis 22. Within this framework, Job suggests that the appropriate response to suffering is to accept it without complaint. YHWH affirms the correctness of this response by commending and rewarding Job in the epilogue. On the other hand, Job’s wife harbors no faith in divine justice, advising her husband to “Blaspheme God” out of spite and in order to provoke his anger, so that he might end Job’s misery by killing him. In both views, God is the source of suffering, but the former view commends faith in divine justice, advising the sufferer to trust that God will ultimately restore him in the end. The latter view, on the other hand, sees the god of Job as a cruel tyrant who meddles with human lives for sport. The advice of Job’s wife allows for two distinct interpretations: either she is recommending defiance in the vein of Job’s poetic speeches of protest or, more likely, she is suggesting that he accept defeat and end his misery. Regardless, she clearly harbors no hope for restoration, and it seems unlikely that she would approve of such a restoration, given her position in the prologue, for a god who destroys human lives for naught is no god worthy of worship, even if he does eventually restore the sufferer (replacing the children that he has murdered with new ones). By contrast, in the poetry, Job’s friends uncritically endorse the traditional retributive view of suffering in an attempt to defend the justice of God, insisting that Job has earned his affliction due to some undisclosed offense. Meanwhile, Job maintains his innocence and indicts God for acting unjustly, thereby adopting the traditional retributive framework for the purpose of refuting its claim of divine justice. According to the poetic Job, the world does not operate according to divine reward and retribution, and one need only to look around at the world to see 92 92 the truth of this fact. Thus, he ultimately rejects this traditional worldview and its oppressive theology. In the theophany, YHWH espouses a non-retributive view, asserting his dominance over humanity and his lack of ethical responsibility to the beings whom he has created. The god of the theophany, then, is a supreme creator deity whose primary characteristic is omnipotence, a theology that deemphasizes the notion of divine benevolence. Furthermore, YHWH asserts that human beings are insignificant in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Therefore, he implies that they have no right to question his authority or to demand a reason for their sufferings. Thus, he reprimands Job for speaking in ignorance and expecting that YHWH owes him a response or a reason for his suffering. According to this view, suffering occurs because the cosmos is infinitely larger than human beings and was not created for their benefit but for uncertain purposes known only to God. Thus, suffering is an enigma impenetrable by human wisdom. In this way, the poet has YHWH reject the wisdom worldview and its retributive view of suffering as well. Finally, Job’s surprising submission and repentance in response to the theophany affirm the theophany’s view of man as an insignificant pawn who is subject to the whims of an all-powerful god. On the other hand, the effectiveness of Job’s demand for a divine audience seems to counter this reading, suggesting that perhaps man is of greater significance than YHWH admits. Even the wager itself, and the role of the adversary as a divine watcher of men who serves as the eyes of God on earth, seems to disprove YHWH’s assertion. In the final analysis, then, it may be surmised that Job’s response suggests an acceptance of the amorality of God and the incomprehensibility of suffering as well as a refusal to replace the dogmatic worldview of the wisdom tradition with any equally 93 93 unfounded assertion, opting instead for an open-ended ambiguity that leaves the text, and the experience of suffering, open to a plurality of interpretative possibilities. Perhaps the most instructive conclusion that the text imparts to modern readers, however, is Job’s wish for an advocate, someone to stand beside him in the midst of his affliction, a comforter and a defender against his persecutors, both human and divine. This wish represents not only a rejection of the theology of reward and retribution, predicated on doctrines of divine justice and power, but also, and perhaps most importantly, a plea for compassion, which is often the only recourse available in the midst of senseless suffering. Without the possibility for justice, compassion is the only thing that might have helped to mitigate Job’s pain, and it is precisely the thing that his friends failed to give him during his time of need.

CHAPTER 4 – INTRODUCTION TO THE POPOL VUH: BACKGROUND AND CULTURAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Popol Vuh (or, Popol Wuj), variously translated as “Council Book” (Tedlock 63), “Book of the Community” (Christenson 64n33), or “Counsel Mat Book” (Christenson 64n33), is a sacred Native American text produced by the K’iche’ (or, Quiché) people of highland Guatemala, one of a number of ethnic groups of the Maya population indigenous to southern Mexico and northern Central America. Located in the region today known as Mesoamerica, the pre- Hispanic K’iche’ kingdom flourished in the central highlands of Guatemala during the Late Postclassic period (ca. 1250 – ca. 1500 CE) and shared much of its cultural heritage with other Mesoamerican civilizations, both contemporary and antecedent. This common cultural heritage permeates the Popol Vuh, and is attested by a wealth of extra-textual evidence, painted on pottery and inscribed on stelae, found at numerous sites throughout Mesoamerica during various historical periods. Scholars typically divide the Popol Vuh into three major sections, each with their own subdivisions. The first is a creation myth detailing the cosmogony of the K’iche’ people and the creation and destruction of various types of creatures prior to the creation of human beings. While the source of this cosmogonic myth is thought to be of pre-Hispanic origin, the version preserved in the Popol Vuh as we know it contains a number of elements that parallel the composite creation narrative of Genesis (chapters 1 – 3), which raises questions about the possibility of Christian influence in the text. While many, and perhaps all, of these parallel features developed independently, it is possible that others may represent K’iche’ responses to the biblical cosmogony introduced to them by the Spanish, as 95 95 scholars such as Dennis Tedlock and Timothy Knowlton have argued. However, for the most part, the Popol Vuh as it has come down to us appears to be the product of a genuine attempt by its authors to preserve the ancient traditions of their people during a time of imminent threat to their collective identity, in which these traditions were under attack and at risk of extinction, since the textual records of those traditions had been either confiscated or destroyed (Tedlock 63, 198; Christenson 64, 305). In accordance with this view, Allen Christenson asserts, The authors were traditionalists, in the sense that they recorded the history and theology of the ancient highland Maya people without adding material from European sources. The Popol Vuh thus contains very little direct Christian influence. By its own account it is a faithful record of the contents of the ancient Popol Vuh text, which could no longer be seen. (35) For the purposes of the present study, however, the distinctions between the two narratives (ancient Israelite and highland Maya) highlight the K’iche’ understanding of the relationship between human beings and their divine progenitors, a relationship predicated on a pan-Mesoamerican notion of interdependence and reciprocity between the human and divine spheres of existence. It is through this “interpenetration” of the natural and supernatural realms that human beings repay their debt to the gods by providing them with the sustenance that they require, whether through remembrance and praise or through rites of bloodletting and human sacrifice (Martin 49-52). According to this worldview, such repayment is required because “the self-sacrifice of the divinities led to the creation of life in the earthly space-time” (Carrasco, Aztecs 68, emphasis in original). 96 96

The second section, which appears to contain the oldest traditions of any of the three sections, is an epic narrative detailing the heroic exploits of a pair of twin culture heroes and trickster figures named Hunahpu and Xbalanque, otherwise known as the “Hero Twins.” This section contains the Vucub Caquix (“Seven Macaw”) episode as well as the descent of the Hero Twins to the underworld, called Xibalba (“Place of Fright”), where they vanquish the lords of death and disease and retrieve the bodies of their deceased uncle and father. The third section is a mytho-historical account of the beginnings of the four tribes of the K’iche’ nation, the establishment of traditional K’iche’ religion (including the practices of human sacrifice and auto-sacrifice), the K’iche’ conquest of the Guatemalan highlands and the establishment of the K’iche’ state, and a genealogy of the lineages of K’iche’ rulers up until the time of the Spanish conquest of the Maya, a gradual process of political and spiritual domination initiated by Pedro de Alvarádo in 1524 at the command of Hernán Cortés, himself (in)famous for his conquest of the Mexica (popularly known as the Aztec) empire beginning with the invasion of 1519. Like the epic narrative poetry of ancient Greece (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and India (the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), as well as the biblical Pentateuch (the Torah), the Popol Vuh appears to be, in part, the product of a rich oral tradition with roots stretching back more than a millennium into the pre-Hispanic past. Thus, much like the Pentateuch, it is a composite corpus comprised of diverse mythical and historical material that developed and evolved over a period of more than a millennium by an exceedingly complex process of cultural diffusion and syncretism. Not unlike the mytho-historical mass migration of the ancient Israelites out of Egypt, related in the biblical book of Exodus, “the Popol Vuh account of a mass migration of all the major Quiché lineage groups into the 97 97

Guatemalan highlands should not be taken literally. Rather, this was more likely a slow process carried out over a period of several centuries involving a complex series of historical and social interactions” (Christenson 31). Furthermore, evidence suggests that many of the K’iche’ lineages “had always lived in the highlands” rather than having conquered and displaced the previous inhabitants, though their authority to exercise military power may have been acquired from an outside political and religious center, as the text states (Christenson 31). The Popol Vuh explicitly refers to this site as the legendary Tulán Zuyua, known to the Toltecs as Tollan (“Place of Reeds”), which, for the K’iche’ Maya, has been variously identified as Tula de Hidalgo by Jiménez Moreno (qtd. in Florescano 140), Teotihuacán by Enrique Florescano in 1999 (qtd. in Florescano 140), Mayapan by Christenson (91n152), and Chichén Itzá by Florescano in 2006 (140). Thus, as Christenson explains, “the confederation of people known as the Quiché was more likely a complex and linguistically diverse group of lineages composed of native highland Maya, Mexicanized clans from nearby Pacific Coastal areas, and immigrants (particularly the Cavec) from the Maya lowlands” (31). Therefore, in his assessment (with which I am inclined to agree), The Popol Vuh does not contain what we would call “objective history.” It is instead a collection of traditions, partly based in historical fact and partly based on mythic interpretation, to describe the rise to power of their own lineages, specifically that of the Cavec who came to dominate the highland Maya region in the fifteenth century. This mixture of highland Maya, lowland Maya, and Mexican-influenced cultures ultimately gave birth to the traditions contained in the Popol Vuh. (31) 98 98

As in the ancient Near East, such cultural cross-pollination by means of intercultural contact is typical of Mesoamerica both before and during the conquest, and accounts for its defining characteristic as not only a distinct, culturally diverse geographic region but also a shared cultural space evincing a number of significant commonalities among various groups and between disparate historical periods. Though the version of the Popol Vuh known to scholars today is a product of much earlier traditions, it is purported to have been compiled and composed in its current form by anonymous K’iche’ scribes in Santa Cruz del Quiché, the Spanish settlement that replaced the capital of the K’iche’ kingdom after its destruction. By comparing its genealogies with extra-textual historical records, it has been determined that the Popol Vuh as we know it was composed sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century, during the conquest of the Guatemalan highlands by the Spanish, a period in which “many indigenous elites had recently converted to Christianity” (Knowlton 3). Evidence suggests that it was written in the K’iche’ language using a modified form of the Latin alphabet (the European script), which had been introduced to the K’iche’ by Spanish missionaries in an attempt to aid in the conversion of the indigenous population to Christianity. The text itself explicitly identifies an earlier document, referred to as both the Popol Vuh and the “original book and ancient writing” (or “the original book . . . that was written anciently”) as its primary source (Tedlock 63, 198; Christenson 64). Enrique Florescano refers to this hypothetical source document as the “Council Book of Q’umar Ka’aj,” the pre-Colonial capital of the K’iche’ kingdom, and identifies the date of completion of the sixteenth-century text as the year 1554, “during the lifetime of Juan de Rojas and Juan de Cortés, who are cited in the book as the last generation of K’iche’ kings” (129). According to the text 99 99 itself, the unrecovered source document was already “now lost” by the time of the completion of its sixteenth-century counterpart and remains unglimpsed by modern eyes (Tedlock 198; Christenson 305). Its description in the Popol Vuh, particularly the text’s emphasis on “seeing” it, suggests that it was one of the numerous folded screen books produced by the pre-Hispanic Maya (Tedlock 63, 198; Christenson 64, 305). Painted on bark paper or deerskin, these screen-fold books contained pictorial representations of important historical events, personages, and scenes from mythical episodes accompanied by elaborate hieroglyphic writing recording astronomical and calendrical data, mythical narratives, historical chronicles, and dynastic genealogies. Of these books, called codices, only three (possibly four) are known to have survived the conflagrations carried out by Spanish missionaries such as Franciscan friar Diego de Landa, who is known to have burned at least forty Maya codices and approximately 20,000 Maya religious images and ritual paraphernalia in an infamous auto-da-fé (“act-of-faith”), a brutal anti-idolatry campaign conducted in the town of Maní in Yucatán on July 12, 1562 (Chuchiak 615). While many scholars are convinced of the authenticity of the Grolier Codex (the fourth possible surviving codex), others consider it a twentieth century forgery (Jordan). The aggressive suppression of indigenous religions and cultural memory by the Spanish failed to extirpate native traditions, however, despite the concerted efforts of numerous missionaries sent to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and stamp out all remnants of “paganism,” “idolatry,” and “devil- worship.” For the Spanish, as evidenced by the writings of de Landa, traditional expressions of indigenous religious beliefs were deemed “superstition and lies of the devil” (qtd. in Christenson 11). The Popol Vuh thus constitutes a survival and preservation of these pre-Hispanic traditions, and, along with the Books of Chilam 100 100

Balam of Yucatán, is among the most valuable extant textual sources for the study of Maya beliefs, myths, and worldview during and prior to the conquest of “Nueva España” (“New Spain”). However, the pre-Hispanic narratives contained within the text are not simply direct transcriptions of an antecedent source document. Rather, they are retellings and reinterpretations of these narratives in light of the contemporary social and symbolic crises presented by the political and spiritual conquest of the indigenous Maya population by the Spanish conquistadores. With this conquest came the introduction of foreign mythic elements into the traditional indigenous discourses of Mesoamerican religions. This meeting of alien cultures with distinct worldviews constituted one of the greatest cultural clashes in human history, resulting not merely in the domination of native populations by outside invaders and the subsequent suppression of native customs and belief systems but rather in a synthesis of Old and New World traditions among the indigenous population. Thus, the native religions were not entirely extirpated but were preserved in modified, hybridized forms as Christian ideas and practices were absorbed and incorporated into existing indigenous religious paradigms. As Laurence Alexander explains, Christianity did not convert the Maya; it was absorbed completely. Perhaps I should say almost completely, for one major symbolic component is lacking. This is the symbolism of evil [that] dominates western religion: the symbolism of evil, of sin, guilt, retribution, punishment is almost totally absent from the Maya absorption of Christianity. It is absent because there is nothing in the Maya symbolic to which Christianity’s symbolization of evil could be 101 101

assimilated. Even the shamanistic rituals of purgation and cleansing lack these composite symbolizations of evil. (8) As Alexander here suggests, there existed among the Maya no concept of absolute evil (as of the type familiar to the apocalyptic faiths), though the supposed complete lack of certain other “symbolizations of evil” (a Ricoeurian formulation) is debatable, and I would argue that some of these ideas (punishment in particular) were indeed existent among the pre-Hispanic Maya. Regardless, it is clear that the Maya responded to the introduction of these foreign symbolic elements into the complex systems of indigenous belief and ritual by grafting unfamiliar Christian theological figures and concepts onto the familiar constructs of their own native traditions in an attempt to form correspondences between the two. For example, “a 1545 report by the cleric Francisco Hernández . . . relates that the Maya associated the aged pre-Hispanic god of life and creation, Itzamna, with Dios Padre [God the Father]; the Bacab with Dios Hijo [God the Son]; and the Ix Chel with the mother of the Virgin” (Knowlton 131). Furthermore, this cultural syncretism is evident in the many modern Latin American religious traditions that combine indigenous beliefs and symbols with imported Christian elements, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Dia de los Muertos (“Day of the Dead”) festival, the Fiesta of Santiago among the Tzutujil Maya, and the cult of Santa Muerte, to provide but a few prominent examples.1 As Davíd Carrasco contends, the synthesis of disparate beliefs and symbols evident in these traditions demonstrates the remarkable “religious creativity” of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their preservation of native religiosity in new, hybrid forms (Religions of Mesoamerica 124-52).

1 See Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica 124-52. 102 102

The earliest extant manuscript of the Popol Vuh—the version known to modern scholars—is a transcription of the sixteenth-century text and an accompanying Spanish translation organized in parallel columns, both produced by Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez during the period of 1701 – 1703 (Quiroa 18-19; Christenson 12). Unfortunately, neither the “Council Book of Q’umar Ka’aj” nor its sixteenth-century K’iche’ counterpart have come down to us. It is also a possibility that the sixteenth-century text never existed, and that Ximénez was the first to compose a written text of the Popol Vuh based on an oral recitation, as some have suggested (Woodruff 104). This possibility seems unlikely, however, given the fact that Ximénez himself makes mention in his own writings of the existence of surviving codices among the Colonial Maya, though he says little about their contents other than indicating their use as divinatory texts (Woodruff 104). This lack of any surviving versions of the text earlier than the Ximénez manuscript presents a number of hermeneutical problems for scholars. The version of the Popol Vuh known to modern readers has traditionally been regarded as a pristine expression of pre-Hispanic indigenous history and religion. However, according to Néstor Ivan Quiroa, Ximénez’s Eurocentric and Christocentric biases may have rendered not only his Spanish translation but also his alphabetic K’iche’ transcription of the sixteenth-century manuscript unreliable. The former concern is valid, but the latter is unconvincing. Regardless, without earlier textual sources, we can neither definitively confirm nor deny the accuracy of either claim, though the latter would require a deliberate forgery, a suggestion as far-fetched as it is controversial. This concern regarding the possible unreliability of the Ximénez manuscript is compounded by the fact that the sixteenth-century text, upon which Ximénez’s manuscript is based, was composed after the arrival of the Spanish, 103 103 during a period of intercultural contact, and thus may not constitute an uncontaminated expression of indigenous traditions. Both Tedlock and Knowlton have presented evidence of Christian influence and possible biblical allusion embedded within various Maya texts produced during the Colonial period, but this evidence is not definitive proof. However, the Popol Vuh itself explicitly states that its authors are writing “about this now amid the preaching of God, in Christendom now,” or “under the law of God and Christianity,” a fact that betrays the exposure of its authors to Christianity and, thus, its possible engagement of Christian teachings in its own internal narrative dialogue (Tedlock 63; Christenson 64). In his book on Maya creation myths, Knowlton asserts that the Popol Vuh “has its own complex colonial histories of emergent meanings in dialogic relation to both pre-Hispanic and European antecedents” (131). Because it simultaneously emerges out of the former and responds to the latter, it may offer insight into the pre-Hispanic past as well as the Colonial contemporary. In a recent book on Maya creation myths, Knowlton warns against “dismissing” such Colonial period Maya texts as mere “concession[s] to Christian teaching” (131). Instead, he contends, “we should consider the various aspects . . . that possibly reflect a history of composition in dialogue with both Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican antecedents” (131). Therefore, in Knowlton’s assessment, “the interpretation of Maya mythologies is enriched by understanding both pre-Hispanic antecedents and the colonial context of competing discourses in which the surviving texts are composed” (132). Though the Popol Vuh was written down in its current form during the Colonial period and may therefore contain elements of Christian influence, iconographic evidence found throughout Mesoamerica indicates that its roots 104 104 stretch back in time to the Classic period (250 – 900 CE) and beyond, which makes it one of the most valuable sources of insight into the pre-Hispanic past. In fact, some of its episodes appear to have originated much earlier, during the Protoclassic period (ca. 50 BCE – 250 CE), and possibly as far back as the Middle Preclassic, also known as the Middle Formative period (950 BCE – 400 BCE). Scenes from the mythic narrative of the “Hero Twins” are painted on both Classic and Late Classic Maya pottery, and the episode involving the destruction of Vucub Caquix appears on two stelae at the Protoclassic (also called the Late Preclassic) site of Izapa. Furthermore, Vucub Caquix has been identified with the Protoclassic Maya “Principal Bird Deity,” represented in the form of monumental stucco masks sculpted onto the exteriors of pyramids at Cerros (Late Preclassic) and Nakbe (Middle to Late Preclassic), perhaps beginning as early as 300 BCE (Miller & Taube 137). A Zapotec form of this being is common among Late Preclassic Zapotec iconography in Oaxaca, where it is referred to as “El Ave de Pico Ancho” (“The Bird with the Broad Beak”). It is also represented on stelae at the Protoclassic site of El Mirador in El Petén, Guatemala, and Maya kings at Kaminaljuyú are known to have “adopted the Principal Bird as an important symbol of power” (Miller & Taube 137). A bit more tenuous, yet worth mentioning, is a pair of monumental sculptures found at the Early Preclassic Olmec “Acropolis” of El Azuzul in Veracruz, Mexico. These twin statues represent nearly identical seated male figures wearing pleated headdresses (perhaps associated with rain and suggestive of priesthood) and facing east. It has been suggested that these twin figures may be a Formative prototype or ancestor of the later Hero Twins, whose exploits are retold in the Popol Vuh (Cyphers 172). In addition to its preservation of antecedent mythic traditions common to various peoples of Mesoamerica, the Popol Vuh also displays a number of pan- 105 105

Mesoamerican cosmological and ideological features that are essential for understanding the view of suffering suggested by the text. These features include, first, a principle of complementarity and interdependence between such oppositional forces as night-and-day and life-and-death, evidenced, for example, by the half-fleshed and half-skeletonized masks of Tlatilco (an Early Preclassic site in Central Mexico), by a similarly half-defleshed ceramic head unearthed in Oaxaca, and by an image on page 56 of the Late Postclassic Central Mexican Codex Borgia representing the Mexica god and culture hero Quetzalcoatl (in his aspect as the wind-deity Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl) and the Mexica death god Mictlantecuhtli enthroned back-to-back in profile, each forming a mirror image of the other, suggesting the unity of these two forces (Díaz & Rodgers 22). Though binary categories such as these are universal motifs of human culture, the distinction here lies in the emphasis on a complementary and interdependent relationship between these two poles, rather than a dichotomous relationship of mutual exclusivity and antagonistic opposition, a monistic view rather than a dualistic view. Wendy Doniger has explained (in the context of Hindu religions) the distinction between these two views in the following way: “one regards evil and good as essentially different and divisible; the other regards them as essentially harmonious and inseparable” (370). Therefore, from this perspective, moral absolutes such as good and evil are not applicable to the forces of life and death. As Karl Taube explains, Although there is a contrast between the chaotic nocturnal hours and those of the day, it is by no means a distinction between good and evil. In Mesoamerican thought, such dualistic principles tend to be considered in complementary opposition: both are required for existence. Just as sleep is a necessary revitalizing counterpart of 106 106

daytime activity, the night and sacred time infuse daily reality with renewed power and force. (Taube 16) Both Carrasco (Religions of Mesoamerica) and Taube (Aztec and Maya Myths) provide clear examples of this principle from Mexica creation mythology. For example, Taube identifies the supreme Mexica creator deity Ometeotl, God of Duality, who “possess[es] both male and female creative principles” and is “also referred to as the couple Tonatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl, Lord and Lady of Our Sustenance” as the embodiment of this interdependent opposition. He also associates this principle with the dual creator deities Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, who are “sometimes allies and sometimes adversaries” who create through combat (31). In the latter example, Taube explains, “creation is the result of complementary opposition and conflict. Much like a dialogue between two individuals, the interaction and exchange between opposites constitute a creative act” (31). Such opposition and conflict does not necessarily imply a dichotomous relationship however. As Fernando Cervantes explains, these dualistic properties should not obscure the strictly monistic nature of Mesoamerican religion. Negative and destructive forces were not the enemies of positive and constructive ones. Both were essential components of the cosmos. Life came from death; creation from destruction. Disharmony was as necessary as harmony. (41) By way of contrast, the apocalyptic faiths envision a utopian future in which the malevolent forces of evil that reign in the will be overcome by the benevolent forces of good, bringing eternal life in the age to come and thus restoring the cosmos to its natural, pristine state. The monistic view, on the other hand, maintains that life and death, good and “evil,” work in tandem for the greater good of creation. 107 107

A second feature is the belief in an interdependent, reciprocal relationship between human beings and their divine progenitors, a relationship which suggests a vision of the cosmos as a “participatory universe” that is dependent upon the action of human beings, who play an active role in its perpetuation through ceremonial “rites of renewal,” a term which Carrasco adopts from the late historian of religions (Wilbert 173; Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica). Carrasco sees these rites of renewal as the third of a tripartite system of processes which he calls, “worldmaking,” “worldcentering,” and “worldrenewing,” a system of ritual practices that serve to orient their participants in time and space through engagement with (i.e., reenactment of) sacred narratives (Religions of Mesoamerica). Third, this pan-Mesoamerican worldview includes a view of time as cyclical, and thus eternally recurring, rather than linear and directed toward a final end (as in the apocalyptic faiths). In this cosmovision, it is human blood that “fuel[s] the cosmic motion, and, by providing that blood through willing sacrifice, humanity play[s] its part in maintaining the cyclical life of the cosmos” (Markman 182). In the case of the Classic Maya, this is related to their conception of the human body, for “[i]n sacrifice, the body itself contributed to the creation of time and space” (Houston, Stuart, & Taube 277). Thus, humanity (the human body in particular) is an integral part of the cosmos, without which life, the gods, and the cosmos itself cannot exist. Related to the aforementioned principles is the idea that new life emerges from death, evidenced by various images linking bloodshed and death with fertility and renewal. These images include frescoes depicting bright blue streams of water pouring from the gaping chest wounds of sacrificial victims who have had their hearts extracted with a flint or obsidian blade, sacrificial victims sprouting serpents or vegetation from severed necks as a result of sacrifice by 108 108 decapitation, and rites such as the arrow sacrifice practiced by the Mexica during the ceremonies of Tlacaxipehualiztli (“Feast of the Flaying of Men”) as well as by the Mixtec, which allows the blood of the victim to spill upon the earth like rain, thus nourishing it. Images such as these are clearly suggestive of fertility, and thus symbolically represent the idea that new life emerges from death as a maize plant sprouts from its seed. Human bones, also, were equated with seeds and thus associated with fertility, since it was believed that the essential life-force of a person resided within his or her bones (Markman 181). This idea of life through death and the equation of bones with seeds is represented in a scene of the Popol Vuh in which the severed, skeletonized head of Hun Hunahpu, the sacrificed father of the Hero Twins, is placed in a calabash tree, which bears fruit in the form of gourds resembling human skulls. Furthermore, the severed head of Hun Hunahpu impregnates Xquic (“Lady Blood” or “Blood Moon”) by spitting into her palm, thus begetting the mythical Hero Twins. Again, here, life arises from death. Classic Maya depictions of this scene alternatively show the head of Hun Hunahpu as a cacao pod or emerging from a maize plant, an iconographic signifier of his identification with the Classic Maya maize god. Regardless of the type of plant depicted, the implication of fertility and regeneration is the same. This equation of bones with seeds is further evidenced in an episode of rebirth in which the Hero Twins are killed and their bones ground into dust and poured into a river with the result that the twins emerge reborn in the form of catfish before reassuming their original forms. These ideas are the fundamental principles that undergird the practice of human sacrifice by many peoples of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. By applying these concepts to the extant material and textual evidence, modern students of Mesoamerican religions are better able to understand the logic behind these 109 109 violent rites and the pre-Hispanic understanding of the suffering that they produced. In the mythic consciousness of both the pre-Hispanic Maya and Mexica, for example, human sacrifice was deemed a culturally acceptable practice because it was viewed in terms of debt and necessity. For the pre-conquest Mexica, human sacrifice functioned as a form of debt payment to gods who had sacrificed themselves for the creation of the sun, the moon, and human beings in the primordial, mythic past. According to Carrasco, “the Aztecs, not having a word like ‘sacrifice,’ called the animals and humans who were ritually killed nextlahualtin, meaning payments or restitutions. These sacrificial entities were basically the ‘payback’—the prized gifts that would bring balance and renewal to the gods” (Aztecs 69). For both the pre-Hispanic Maya and Mexica, human sacrifice and auto- sacrifice through ritual bloodletting were necessary practices that sustained the cosmos, in part by ensuring the sun’s daily journey across the sky and its nightly passage through the underworld. Among the Mexica, regular offerings of disembodied hearts (called “precious eagle-cactus fruit”) were necessary to sustain the sun in this daily journey, and to ward off the destruction of the world by “demonic” forces called tzitzimime, the personified stars, which were expected to descend from the night-sky to “reassert their control” and “destroy the world” at the end of the “Fifth Sun,” the present age “named Sun 4 Movement in anticipation of the earthquakes prophesied to one day destroy the Aztec world” (Aztecs 71).2 Carrasco refers to this anxiety as a “cosmic paranoia” suffered by the Mexica, a “haunting sense of insecurity, instability, and profound threats from the

2 See Carrasco, Aztecs 75 and Taube, Aztec and Maya Myths 15 and 33-41. 110 110 gods, nature, and the social landscape” (Aztecs 70). However, this periodic destruction also entailed renewal in the creation of the next age. Therefore, though this view of history may appear reminiscent of the eschatological worldviews of the apocalyptic faiths, it would be inaccurate to consider it an eschatological view because the destruction of the present age is not an absolute end. Rather, it is simply a necessary part of the process of regeneration, the moment at which the cycle of creation and destruction begins anew. As among certain sects of Hinduism, , Jainism, and other such “Eastern” belief systems that accept the doctrine of (known also by the term “transmigration” and the Greek terms μετεμψύχωσις and παλιγγενεσια), as well as among such ancient Greek thinkers as Pythagoras and Socrates (according to Plato’s Phaedo) who also supposedly subscribed to such a doctrine, the pre- Hispanic conception of time was cyclical rather than linear. Therefore, by definition, there is no in Mexica because there are no “last things” (the literal meaning of the term, from the Greek ἔσχατος, meaning “last”). As Carrasco explains, the above “pattern of birth, fulfillment, destruction, darkness, and rebirth is the overall worldview inside which the Aztecs dwelled, constructed their capital, and lived their daily lives” (Aztecs 71). In the context of this pan-Mesoamerican principle of the necessity of destruction for regeneration and renewal, the ritual complexes of the great pre- Hispanic city-states were designed and constructed as symbolic representations of the cosmos in miniature. For example, the Great Temple (today known as the “Templo Mayor”) of the Mexica capital Tenochtítlan was called Coatepec (“Serpent Mountain”) and stood as a symbolic representation of this sacred mountain on which Huitzilopochtli, the patron deity of the Mexica, had emerged from the womb in full battle regalia, brandishing the xiuhcoatl (“fire-serpent”) and 111 111 triumphing over his enemies, a myth that provided a model and charter for the sacrificial practices performed at the summit of this temple, which was considered the axis mundi (the “center of the world”).3 It was within these monumental ceremonial centers that the initial sacrifices of the gods were reenacted by human beings in imitatio deorum (“imitation of the gods”), thus regenerating their past effects (namely, the creation of the cosmos and the apparent motion of the celestial bodies) in the present. In Mexica society, for example, those offered to the gods were “ritually transformed into a receptacle containing the divine being” (Carrasco, Aztecs 69). Thus, they symbolically became the self-sacrificed gods by adorning the ceremonial regalia associated with them. For this reason, “the people who were to be sacrificed were called teteo ixiptla (deity impersonators)” (Carrasco, Aztecs 65). When one of these impersonators was killed upon the altar, he became consecrated (literally, made sacred, which is what the word “sacrifice” means) through the act of sacrifice. In this manner, the Mexica “repeated the creative sacrificial death the gods had undergone in the mythic times when the two space-times [human and divine] of the universe were first linked through sacrifice” (Carrasco, Aztecs 69). In the pan-Mesoamerican cosmovision, human beings and the gods coexist in an interdependent, reciprocal relationship that involves an exchange of resources in a ritual economy: human beings repay their debt to the gods (to whom they owe their very existence) and provide them with sustenance in the form of sacrificial offerings of human blood, hearts, and lives as well as material goods. The gods, in return, provide rain, victory in battle, corn and other crops, and general prosperity to the people whom they have created for the purpose of

3 See Carrasco, Aztecs 72-75 and Religions of Mesoamerica 73-77. 112 112 honoring and paying tribute to them. Thus, from the Mesoamerican perspective, the divine-human relationship is a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Furthermore, suffering appears to have had a positive value in the minds of at least some pre-Hispanic cultures. The greater the suffering induced by the act of sacrifice, the greater the value and efficacy of the offering and, thus, the greater the veneration of the deity being propitiated. This positive economic value of suffering may help to explain the costly sacrifices of children, who would have been precious commodities in a time and place in which the infant mortality rate was exceedingly high. In the collective estimation of Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Maya body (or, more precisely, the heart) felt deeply: while doing archaeology, only the hard-hearted specialist fails to perceive the ancient pain associated with the burial of an infant or the anguish that must have been felt by sacrificial victims. That adult or parental love of children differed radically from today seems unlikely, even a moral defamation of the past. (278) The idea that suffering has a positive value is further evidenced in the practice, prevalent throughout pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, of auto-sacrifice by means of ritual bloodletting, “the most common form of sacrifice” in the pre- Hispanic world (Carrasco, Aztecs 65). Classic Maya kings and queens in particular, as evidenced on the lintels of Yaxchilán, “selected the most painful ways to let blood,” such as by perforating the foreskin (for males) or tongue (for females) with stingray spines or other bloodletting implements, and then passing straws or ropes lined with thorns through the open wound. This was apparently done for two reasons: (1) to promote greater blood-flow from the wound and (2) to induce greater physical pain and, thus, its mental-emotional corollary: suffering 113 113

(Baudez 287).4 Therefore, it is not merely the act of giving blood or sacrificed bodies that constitutes the sacrificial gift to the gods, but also, in at least some cases, the experience of pain, inflicted upon oneself and others, which “adds value” to the sacrifice (Baudez). In Stephen Houston’s assessment, “Pain may not be ‘good.’ In Mesoamerica, however, it was ‘moral’ in the sense of serving larger purposes and helping to meet inescapable obligations. Pain had meaning” (336, emphasis in original). Pain may also have served a political purpose in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Among the Classic Maya, it seems that the torture of war captives was practiced, at least in part, to demonstrate the power of the captors. Representations of Maya rulers on murals and stelae show them as “emotionally cold, carefully contained and reserved,” in contrast with tortured captives, who are typically shown weeping, their mouths agape in agony (Houston et al. 278). One shocking example seen among the murals at Bonampak in Chiapas, Mexico, depicts a group of captives (possibly royal scribes) on their knees, their faces contorted with pain as they display their bleeding, mutilated fingers to a stoic Maya king. Their fingernails have most likely been removed and their fingers broken, possibly as a means of severing the written record of the enemy (Jordan). Elsewhere, captives are depicted with conventionally stylized tears on their faces and elaborate speech scrolls emanating from their mouths, indicating vocal expressions of suffering such as wailing or weeping. Thus, for Classic Maya rulers, torture was a means of dehumanizing their enemies, who “lost all restraint and, one presumes, their sense of dignity” in the process (Houston et al. 278). Apparently, this loss of dignity served to elevate the dignity of Maya rulers by

4 See also Schele & Miller 186-90. 114 114 contrast. According to Houston et al., “The regulated, disciplined body was that of the captive who had lost autonomous will. But it was also that of the ruler who emoted little if at all as a way of demonstrating his superiority” (278). Depictions of suffering in Classic Maya art appear limited to scenes of warfare and the torture of dishonored captives. In stark contrast to these displays of emotion, Maya elites are depicted as stoic figures, masters of their emotions, a feature that elevates them above the corporeal, mortal existence of human beings and equates them with the status of powerful gods. This transcendence of humanity can be seen as a kind of symbolic apotheosis by which these Maya kings “became” gods, their images erected throughout ceremonial centers on stelae that symbolized the axis mundi and in monumental sculpture resembling the stone effigies of gods. Such visual propaganda is typical among Classic Maya art, which often equates Maya rulers with divinities, such as the maize god, through artificial cranial deformation (whether via stylized artistic representation or actual physical deformity, as in the case of the Palenque king Janaab Pakal) and regalia that associates them with this deity. Furthermore, the relative lack of explicit, graphic images of suffering in Classic Maya art in public spaces (as compared to the characteristically hyper-violent art of the Mixtec and Mexica, for example5) may indicate a conscious effort on the part of Maya elites to promote a willingness among their subjects to perform self-sacrifice for the state and the gods. Thus, Maya elites are depicted letting their own blood stoically in imitation of the gods. Auto-sacrifice is thereby presented as a sacred ideal, a form of visual propaganda likely designed to promote the performance of sacrificial rites among the populace.

5 See, for example, the many scenes of bloody sacrifice in such ancient Mexican codices as the Codex Borgia and the Codex Nuttall. 115 115

This willingness was promoted by the omnipresence of religio-political propaganda via the construction of monumental architecture and other forms of visual art within the ceremonial centers of these theocratic city-states, as evidenced, for example, by the many xiuhcoatl masks on the Temple of Quetzalcoatl facade at Teotihuacán. Taube has convincingly argued that this figure is an “emblem of the office of war,” and notes that while it is “decidedly Teotihuacano in origin, [it] is commonly worn by Classic Maya rulers” (Taube, Temple of Quetzalcoatl 53). Further evidence can be seen among the many feathered serpent, trapeze and ray, and talud-tablero forms (all associated with a widespread cult of sacred war and veneration of the feathered serpent in Epiclassic and Postclassic art) at numerous Mesoamerican sites bearing the prominent influence of Teotihuacán, such as Cacaxtla and Chichén Itzá; among vibrantly colored frescoes such as those of Bonampak and Cacaxtla, which depict, among other things, warriors in battle regalia engaged in combat and the torture and sacrifice of war captives; among the iconography and tzompantlis (“skull-racks”) of the capital of the Mexica empire, Tenochtítlan; and among stelae at Copán, Tikal, and elsewhere, which commemorate the military campaigns of kings and glorify them by identifying them with the gods through an elaborate visual language of power. Of Teotihuacán, Taube writes, “Clearly, there was not a contrast between secular military offices and religious ideology, because it was a cult of sacred war providing a divine charter for rulership” (Taube, Temple of Quetzalcoatl 83). He goes on to contend that, “in terms of the state, the death of [slain warriors] does represent a supreme act of self-sacrifice” (83). Thus, warfare too, along with the suffering and death that it produces, is interpreted in sacred terms and equated with the practice of ritual sacrifice. Therefore, suffering is necessary for the benefit of both the gods and the state. 116 116

Neither was the necessity of suffering escapable in the . Much like the gloomy underworlds of ancient Greece (Hades) and ancient Israel (Sheol), the Maya underworld was conceived not as a place of eternal punishment for committed in life (the ultimate form of divine retribution), as in the example of the Christian , but the final abode of all who died, with few exceptions. As Michael Coe explains, among the Classic Maya, “the underworld was the destination of all those who ‘died in bed,’ . . . [while] the Maya heaven . . . was reserved for those who suffered unusual deaths, such as slain warriors, women who died in childbirth, and those who perished from drowning” (89). Similarly, among the Mexica, the default post mortem destination was a gloomy underworld called Mictlan (ruled by the death god Mictlantecuhtli) and the elect included those killed in battle or sacrifice, thus providing a religious incentive for warriors to die in battle for the state or to endure heart extraction for the gods. Both were considered honorable ends by which warriors would be reborn in the floral paradise of the sun god, a common Mesoamerican heavenly realm associated with “the sun, heat, music, and brilliant or iridescent colors” (Taube, Flower Mountain 69). For this reason, “death on the battlefield was called xochimiquiztli (flowery death)” and death by sacrifice was considered a solemn display of devotion to the gods (Carrasco, Aztecs 64). It is the goal of the present study to demonstrate the presence of the aforementioned concepts in the Popol Vuh through the methods of close reading and comparative analysis of both textual and extra-textual evidence discovered at various sites throughout the Mesoamerican world. By identifying parallel representations of these ideas in the iconography and mythology of neighboring and antecedent peoples, the study aims to highlight their presence in the Popol Vuh. It is through the lens of these pan-Mesoamerican principles that the pre- 117 117

Hispanic Maya perspective on suffering emerges from the text, a regenerative view predicated on the monistic principles of complementary opposition, the creation of life from death, and an interdependent, reciprocal relationship between human beings and the gods who created them in illo tempore (“in that time,” an Eliadean formulation signifying the sacred time of the primordial, mythic past). Thus, let us turn to the text in an attempt to illustrate the presence of this distinctive view, as well as the now familiar retributive view, within it.

CHAPTER 5 – THE POPOL VUH: RITUAL SACRIFICE AND THE REGENERATIVE VIEW OF SUFFERING

There has yet to be a systematic cataloguing and analysis of the numerous and varied representations of suffering in the myths of the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mesoamerica, in the vein of Paul Ricoeur’s study of the “symbolism of evil” in the Hebraic and Hellenic “myths of the beginning and the end” and Wendy Doniger’s study of the diverse origins of evil in Hindu myth. This study, in part, constitutes an initial step toward that end. The following analysis will examine three mythic episodes of the Popol Vuh in which representations of suffering feature prominently, all of which serve to illustrate the pre-Hispanic Maya worldview, and, by extension, certain pan-Mesoamerican perspectives on suffering evidenced by the art and literature of a number of pre-Hispanic civilizations. The three episodes most relevant to this discussion are, (1) the creation myth, by which the gods attempt to create beings capable of “providing” for and “sustaining” them through worship, specifically by speaking their names; (2) the demise of the monstrous bird Vucub Caquix, who is punished for violating the relationship between the creator gods and their creations in his arrogant attempt to elevate his status to the level of godhood by claiming to be the sun; and (3) the defeat of the lords of Xibalba by the Hero Twins, the resurrection of their father in the form of the maize god (which supplies the gods with the necessary material to at last create beings who will sustain them), and their subsequent dual apotheosis as the sun and moon, all of which make possible the establishment of a reciprocal relationship between the gods and human beings in which both groups provide for and sustain the other. Within the context of the pan-Mesoamerican worldview evidenced by these myths, suffering is a necessary fact of existence because the world is sustained by the interaction of complementary pairs of opposing yet 119 119 interdependent forces, which ebb and flow in a cosmic cycle of death and regeneration. Furthermore, suffering as a product of sacrifice is a necessary gift that provides nourishment for the gods and, thus, ensures the continuation of the cosmos. All of these principles can be found embedded within the Popol Vuh, as the following analysis aims to demonstrate.

The Creation: Suffering for a Greater Good Following a brief preamble that introduces the text and its Colonial period context, the Popol Vuh begins with the creation of the cosmos in a time of silence “in the darkness, in the night,” when the “womb of the sky” is “empty” and neither the earth nor human beings have yet to be conceived (Christenson 67, 68). After successfully creating the earth (which is conceptualized as a cosmic maize field with “four sides” and “four corners”) and separating it from the primordial waters of the sea, the gods express the purpose of creation with a series of questions: “How shall it be sown? When shall there be a dawn for anyone? Who shall be a provider? Who shall be a sustainer?” (71). This series of questions encapsulates the relationship required for the sustenance of the gods and the maintenance of the cosmos. The “provider” and “sustainer” spoken of by the gods foreshadow the creation of human beings. Christenson explains that the noun tzuqul (“provider”) refers to “a provider of any kind, although generally in the sense of food,” and that the noun q’o’l (“sustainer”) refers to “one who provides sustenance, primarily in the form of nourishment, but also nurtures in another way, such as a mother caring for an infant” (Christenson 71n66-67). This suggests that, because human beings are begotten by the gods, it is their responsibility to return the favor by feeding, nourishing, and even nurturing their progenitors by the appropriate means. Thus, human beings too play a vital role in the maintenance of the cosmos; the gods 120 120 create it, but human beings must sustain it through ritual performance. The gods acknowledge this necessity with the recognition that “there can be no worship, no reverence given by what we have framed and what we have shaped, until humanity has been created, until people have been made” (71). The creation myth of the Popol Vuh details not only the beginning of the cosmos and the eventual creation of human beings, but also the suffering and destruction of various pre-human creatures that fail to serve the aforementioned needs of the gods. These creatures are made to suffer through no fault of their own, but rather for the failure of the gods to imbue them with the ability to remember and worship them by speaking their names. However, it is clear that from the perspective of the text, these destructions are justified because they are deemed a necessary part of the process of creation, thus serving a greater good. First, the gods create the animals and command them to “Speak therefore our names. Worship us, for we are your Mother and your Father. . . . Speak! Call upon us! Worship us!” (76). It is at this point that it becomes explicitly clear that the gods’ purpose in conducting the creation is to engender beings capable of worshipping them, specifically through the act of speech, for “only in this way could the gods be worshipped properly—through the articulation of their names with human speech” (Christenson 76n83). The animals, however, are incapable of articulate human speech, “they only squawked and chattered and roared,” and “their speech was unrecognizable, for each cried out in a different way” (76). The gods then speak amongst themselves, saying, “They were not able to speak our names. We are their Framer and their Shaper. . . . This is not good” (77). Therefore, they decide to replace the animals, declaring, You shall be replaced because you were not successful. You could not speak. . . . Because you have not been able to worship us or call 121 121

upon us, there will yet be someone else who may be a worshiper. We shall now make one who will give honor. Your calling will merely be to have your flesh eaten. Thus be it so. This must be your service. (77) Thus, the text states, “the animals that were on the face of the earth were eaten and killed” (77). Not only does this feature of the myth provide an etiological account of the origin of human carnivorism, but it also makes explicit the gods’ reason for causing the animals to suffer, which in turn affirms the necessity of worshipping the gods. The text makes explicit the fact that the animals’ inadequacy is not their fault. Rather, it is “because of the way they were made” that they were “not successful” (77). Therefore, the responsibility for suffering, in this case, is placed upon the gods themselves. Because the animals are incapable of serving the gods by providing them with the food and nourishment that they require, they are “made to serve” human beings by providing their own flesh as nourishment for humankind, as human beings will later do for the gods (77). After punishing the animals, the gods “try again” to “arrange for those who will worship them” (77). The phrase “try again” here implies a degree of uncertainty as to whether the gods will again fail in their second attempt, thus emphasizing their mistake. Christenson here indicates that the verb nuk’ means “to arrange for something” but also carries the connotation “to experiment or test,” which is highly suggestive of uncertainty (Christenson 77n87). Thus, the gods make “another attempt to frame and shape man”: Let us try again before the first sowing, before the dawn approaches. Let us make a provider, a sustainer for us. How shall we then be called upon so that we are remembered upon the face of the earth? 122 122

We have already made a first attempt with what we have framed and what we have shaped, but we were not successful in being worshiped or in being revered by them. Thus, let us try again to make one who will honor us, who will respect us; one who will be a provider and a sustainer. (78) They next create a man of mud, much like the creation of the ’āḏām (meaning simply “man” or “human being,” from the Hebrew noun ’ăḏāmāh, meaning “ground” or “earth”), the primordial ancestor of the Judeo-Christian tradition, found in Genesis 2.4b – 3.24. This man of mud, however, is “still not good”: It merely came undone and crumbled. It merely became sodden and mushy. It merely fell apart and dissolved. Its head was not set apart properly. Its face could only look in one direction. . . . At first it spoke, but without knowledge. Straightaway it would merely dissolve in water, for it was not strong. (78) Tedlock considers this similarity to the biblical ’āḏām an implicit critique of the Judeo-Christian creation myth presented to the K’iche’ by Franciscan missionaries, a covert rejection of this primordial man who “[can] only look in one direction” and “[speaks] without knowledge” (qtd. in Knowlton 132). At seeing this creature, the gods again surmise that they’ve “made a mistake” and decide to “undo” their creation (78, 79). Thus, they begin anew once more. Again they ask, “How then will we truly make that which may succeed and bear fruit; that which will worship us and that will call upon us?” (79). The phrase “bear fruit” here again emphasizes the necessary nourishing quality of their desired creation. Utterance of the divine names is the “fruit” that is required to feed and sustain the gods. So again, they set out “to create framed and shaped people who will be 123 123

[their] providers and sustainers” (80). “May we be called upon, and may we be remembered,” they proclaim, “for it is with words that we are sustained . . . Thus, may it be spoken. May it be sown” (80). So they create a third race of beings, this time effigies made of wood. These effigies of wood had the appearance of people and spoke like people as well. . . . Nevertheless, they still did not possess their hearts nor their minds. They did not remember their Framer or their Shaper. . . . They were merely an experiment, an attempt at people. . . . Thus they were not capable of understanding before their Framer and their Shaper, those who had given them birth and given them hearts. (83-84) Because of this, the gods determine that these creatures ought to be “ruined, crushed, and killed” (85). To accomplish this destruction, they send a flood that falls “down upon the heads of the effigies of wood,” presumably drowning a great number of them (85). There also appear at the time of the flood four destructive forces that plague the wooden people. These four destructive forces take the form of wild beasts and man-made implements: “Chiselers of Faces, who gouged out their eyes,” “Death Knives, which cut off their heads,” “Crouching Jaguar, who ate their flesh,” and “Striking Jaguar, who struck them” (85). All of these beings, the text states, “smashed their bones and their tendons”: “Their bones were ground up. They were broken into pieces. Their faces were ground up because they proved to be incapable of understanding before the face of their mother and the face of their father” (86). In addition to the flood and a host of beasts that crush, devour, and dismember them, the animals return seeking revenge for the pain that the wooden people have caused them by killing and eating them. Likewise, their own cooking griddles, pots, grinding stones, and hearthstones exact revenge for burning them 124 124 and grinding their faces. As a result, the wooden people are burned like their pots and hearthstones, their flesh ground “like maize,” and their faces ground upon and “crushed” by these objects (87-88). What’s more, they are eaten by their dogs as recompense for their mistreatment and consumption of them. Thus the text relates, “the mouths and the faces of all of them were ruined and crushed,” and those who survived became the ancestors of monkeys today (89, 90). In addition to providing an etiology of the flat faces and humanoid appearance of monkeys, the lex talionis evident in this scene may reflect some guilt on the part of its tellers for the pain caused by the slaughter and consumption of animals, or, alternatively, it may reflect a general fear of retribution, whether natural (animal) or supernatural (divine). Taken as a whole, this myth illustrates the necessity, in the pre-Hispanic worldview, of paying tribute to the gods, a tradition that undergirds the practice of ritual human sacrifice, a religious and political institution by which the gods are nourished and the rulers of theocratic city-states maintain control over their subjects. The initial failed attempts of the gods highlight the necessity of this relationship, which will come to provide a charter for the practices of human sacrifice and auto-sacrifice, as seen in the final section of the Popol Vuh, in its mytho-historical narratives that relate the feeding of the K’iche’ god Tohil (Tojil), the literally bloodthirsty patron deity of the Cavec lineage, who receives nourishment by “suckling” from his sacrificial victims like an infant from its mother, though he does so “through their sides, under their arms” (Tedlock 156, 165). According to the text, this “suckling” is a metaphor for sacrifice by heart extraction (Tedlock 156, 165). Though various universal theories of sacrifice have been proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor, William Robertson Smith, Henri Hubert and Marcel 125 125

Mauss, James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, , René Girard, Walter Burkert, Nancy Jay, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Douglas Hedley, precisely how and why these extreme practices of ritual sacrifice originated among the cultures of Mesoamerica remains uncertain, though bloodletting implements and other ritual paraphernalia related to shamanic practice have been discovered at various Olmec sites, which flourished during the Early and Middle Formative period (ca. 1500 – ca. 400 BCE). While Olmec civilization is known to have been instrumental in the development of many beliefs and practices common among later Mesoamerican cultures (including ritual bloodletting, calendrics, and possibly hieroglyphic writing), the Popol Vuh contains possible clues about the origins of human sacrifice among the K’iche’. The text states that the ancestors of the K’iche’ travel to the sacred site of Tulán Zuyua, where they “receive” their gods. These adopted gods (Tohil among them) require offerings of human blood rather than mere honor and praise through the remembrance and recitation of their names. Thus, here it seems that readers are witness to the adoption of the institution of human sacrifice by the ancestors of the K’iche’, a development that the text preserves within its mytho-historical narrative. It is possible that they may have acquired the Hero Twins cycle of myths from this site as well, with their vivid descriptions of violent sacrifice in the underworld, since the creator gods make no mention of such requirements in the creation myth that begins the Popol Vuh. Perhaps these two myth-cycles (the creation cycle and the Hero Twins cycle) stem from two or more distinct sources, containing their own gods and ritual proscriptions, that became unified through the merging of once disparate groups, each with their own stories and traditions, thus forming the confederation that would become the K’iche’ nation. 126 126

Ultimately, the suffering of the various pre-human creatures represented in the creation myth demonstrates that sometimes the gods are the source of suffering, though this suffering is clearly understood to be a necessary part of the process of creation and the establishment of the ritual economy of sacrificial/symbolic exchange between gods and human beings, a formulation that becomes problematic when the gods demand human blood or lives for their sustenance.

The Fall of Vucub Caquix: The Return of the Retributive View Following the cosmogonic narrative of repeated creation and destruction, the text relates the suffering and demise of Vucub Caquix, the monstrous bird (perhaps a deposed historical ruler) who is punished for falsely claiming to be the sun. The text relates that he “puff[s] himself up” with pride, proclaiming, “I am great. I dwell above the heads of the people who have been framed and shaped. I am their sun. I am also their light. And I am also their moon” (92). This act of “self-magnification before the Heart of Sky,” the principal creator god named Huracán, constitutes an attempt to usurp the power of this god (Tedlock 77). In “puff[ing] himself up” by making these pronouncements, Vucub Caquix is arrogantly attempting to elevate his status to the level of godhood, thus violating the proper dynamic between creator and created (91, 93). Rather than nourishing and revering the gods, he does the opposite, claiming that worship for himself. The Hero Twins clearly indicate that this violation must be alleviated before the creation of human beings can take place: Good shall never come of this. People will never be able to live here on the face of the earth. Thus we will try to shoot him with our blowguns. . . . [W]e will shoot him, thus causing him to be afflicted. 127 127

. . . May it be done thus, for people cannot be created where only gold and silver are glory. (95) One of the twins, Hunahpu, shoots Vucub Caquix in the jaw with his blowgun, which the text states “dislocate[s]” it, causing Vucub Caquix’s teeth to “torment [him] with pain” (97). The stance of the author(s) on this point is clear, for the text explicitly states, “it was good what they did” (97). Vucub Caquix flees, but he has yet to be defeated, and the twins have not yet finished with his punishment. They accomplish his destruction by recruiting the ancestral deities First Grandfather and First Grandmother, called Xpiyacoc and Xmucane respectively, to pose as healers and remove the teeth and eyes of the creature through trickery, replacing the brilliant turquoise jewels with which they are inlaid with “white grains of maize” (100). “Thus the basis for his pride [i]s completely taken away,” he is defeated, and the balance of creation is restored (100). This episode illustrates one of the primary social functions of myth: its ability to model proper behavior, in this case by providing a negative example. The message here is clear: hubris (a “sin” committed) leads to just suffering and a deserved death. Both the aforementioned creation myth and the Vucub Caquix myth serve similar ends. The creation myth is a myth of origin and, thus, identity. It serves to inform its audience about who they are as a collective people, where they’ve come from, and most importantly, the nature of their relationship to the cosmos and the gods who created it. The primary function of the Vucub Caquix myth is didactic and works in concordance with the creation myth to demonstrate the negative consequences of forgetting or neglecting one’s identity by violating the proscriptions established during creation. The significance of the myth’s central focus on the punishment of hubris is the fact that such behavior constitutes a violation of the aforementioned reciprocal relationship between human beings 128 128 and their gods. In his boasting, Vucub Caquix is attempting to elevate himself to the status of godhood, which disrupts the balance of creation. The Hero Twins, then, act as agents or enforcers of the divine will who maintain social order by restoring the balance of the divine-human relationship. This idea is again evident in the creation of human beings later in the text. When the gods at last succeed in creating beings who are capable of sustaining them with worship, they realize that these beings are omniscient and quickly set out to remedy this problem by limiting the sight of human beings so that they can no longer see all things clearly but only that which is directly in front of them. On the one hand, this detail provides an etiological explanation for the limitation of human vision, a fact that itself causes a great deal of suffering by preventing people from being able to foresee and thus prevent disaster, but the focus here, again, is on the distinction between gods and human beings, and the relationship between them. This limitation imposed upon human sight is a metaphor for the limitation of human knowledge. Apparently, as with the biblical myth of the Edenic exile, in which human beings are forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (representing divine knowledge) and are evidently prohibited also from eating of the Tree of Life (representing immortality) for fear that they will become like the gods,1 human beings are not meant to acquire too much knowledge because, if they do, they approach divinity, which, for the Maya, disrupts the balance established by the gods and thus negates the sole purpose of creation. Therefore, it is necessary for human beings to remain limited in their knowledge in order not to upset the established order of the cosmos. The limitations that human beings experience are due to the fact that human existence,

1 See Gen. 3.5 and 3.22 – 23. 129 129 like the existence of all animals, is a corporeal existence; the human body is a material body that is fixed in space and time, and is subject to natural degenerative processes that result in aging and death. It is these limitations that define human beings in contrast with their divine counterparts. If the gods are defined as omniscient and immortal beings that see and know all, then human beings, by contrast, are defined as mortal beings whose sight, and thus knowledge, is limited. Thus, the myth of Vucub Caquix is, at least in part, a myth about human identity. Ultimately, the suffering of Vucub Caquix shows that suffering sometimes occurs as retribution for improper conduct. In other words, it comes as a just punishment for a violation of the social order. Thus, according to the myth, Vucub Caquix (the victim of suffering), rather than the gods, is to blame for his own suffering.

The Defeat of the Death Lords: Suffering as Cosmic Conflict Finally, the Hero Twins cycle of myths concludes with the defeat of the lords of Xibalba by the twins, the resurrection of their father (the maize god of the Classic Maya), and their ascent to the heavens as the sun and moon. Not unlike the Adamic myth of the Fall, this myth deals in part with the source of suffering in the world. However, unlike the Adamic myth, there is no ultimate origin of suffering explained here. The text does identify the death lords as the source of certain types of suffering (those caused by disease and possibly death by natural causes), but it makes no mention of the ultimate origin of suffering itself (in contrast to the genesis of pain and hardship that is a consequence of the exile from Eden). Perhaps this is because suffering, for the authors of the Hero Twins myths, was simply understood to be a necessary product of existence. The Hero Twins myth cycle indicates that, in the world of the Popol Vuh, the cause of the generalized suffering produced by illness is indeed the death lords who reside in the nine- 130 130 layered underworld, among them Scab Stripper and Blood Gatherer, Demon of Pus and Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter and Skull Scepter, and the two principal lords of Xibalba, Hun Came (“One Death”) and Vucub Came (“Seven Death”) (Tedlock 92). However, the origin of these characters is left unexplained by the text. What is certain, on the other hand, is the fact that their powers become limited as a result of their defeat by the twins. Before this defeat, they exercise free reign to claim victims from the overworld at will, as they do in the case of Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu (the twin ball-playing father and uncle of the Hero Twins), but after their defeat, they no longer possess such freedom. Thus, what is most significant about this myth, for the purpose of the present study, are the restrictions imposed upon the death lords as a result of their defeat by the twins as well as the resurrection of their father Hun Hunahpu, whom the death lords had decapitated before placing his head in the calabash tree and burying his headless body in the underworld ball-court along with his brother Vucub Hunahpu. Though Huh Hunahpu’s identification as the maize god is nowhere made explicit in the extant version of the text known to modern readers, his identification with this figure and successful rebirth in this form are attested to by numerous Classic texts and images, such as the detail of a Late Classic Maya bowl that features a depiction of the maize god, flanked by his two sons Hunahpu and Xbalanque, emerging out of the earth, which is represented in the form of a split turtle shell. Such evidence reveals the profound significance of Hun Hunahpu’s resurrection for the Classic Maya, despite the fact that it is conspicuously absent from the later text of the Popol Vuh. Ultimately, what this cycle of myths reveals is that the defeat of the death lords represents the triumph of the forces of order (represented by the Hero Twins) over those of chaos, a necessary struggle of opposing, interdependent forces for the benefit of creation. It 131 131 is this conflict that results in the resurrection of Hun Hunahpu as the maize god and sufficiently suppresses the chaotic forces of death and disease in order to allow for the creation of human beings out of the renewed maize crop. In true trickster fashion, the Hero Twins manage to defeat the death lords through deception and trickery. By disguising themselves as traveling dancers and magicians capable of performing the miraculous resurrection of sacrificial victims, they manage to manipulate the two principal death lords Hun Came and Vucub Came into volunteering to be sacrificed: “Do it to us! Sacrifice us! . . . Sacrifice us in the same way!” the two lords exclaim, after witnessing the twins’ marvelous trick (Christenson 185). The twins oblige, and both of the principal death lords are killed by means of heart extraction, “torn open as punishment for what they had done,” first Hun Came and then Vucub Came, who “beg[s] humbly, weeping before the dancers” (185, emphasis added). Thus, in an act of retribution, the Xibalbans lose their rulers and are defeated by the twin avengers. The Hero Twins then reveal themselves to be the twin sons of Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, “avengers of the misfortune and affliction of [their] fathers” who justly repay suffering with suffering, while the remaining death lords cower in fear, “begg[ing] humbly” and “weeping” just as Vucub Came had done before them. “Take pity on us, Hunahpu and Xbalanque,” they cry. “Truly we have wronged your fathers that you have named—they who are buried at Crushing Ballcourt” (187). The Hero Twins spare their lives but declare that the lords will no longer claim dominion over the earth, nor will they be given praise or sacrificial offerings worthy of true gods: Never again will you or your posterity be great. Your offerings also will never again be great. . . . No longer will clean blood be yours. . . You shall surely eat only the creatures of the grass and the creatures 132 132

of the wastelands. No longer will you be given the children of the light [human beings], those begotten in the light. Only things of no importance will fall before you. Only the sinner and the malevolent, the wretch and the molester who clearly have sinned, will be given to you. No longer will you be able to seize suddenly just any person. (Christenson 187-88). Here, Christenson notes a comment made by Tedlock’s Maya collaborator, Andrés Xiloj, who states that, in modern Maya belief, it is still said that “the Xibalbans are allowed to collect only blood that has been spilled on the ground (through injury, illness, or violence), thus making it dirty” (Christenson 187n432). Therefore, the Xibalbans are forced to lap the dirty blood that has been spilled as a result of injury or unsanctioned violence, rather than the fresh, consecrated blood of divinely sanctioned sacrifice. A very interesting and important observation can be drawn from this detail. While the death lords are no longer able to receive nourishment from blood-sacrifice, since they are “surely . . . not true gods,” they do receive it from blood spilled as a result of secular violence, which suggests that violence that occurs outside of the sacred spaces designated for the performance of state-sanctioned, institutionalized forms of violence (i.e., within the confines of ceremonial precincts and battlefields) actually feeds the death lords, granting them greater power to inflict suffering upon their overworld counterparts (188). Furthermore, note in the passage above that the death lords may still claim “the sinner and the malevolent,” a statement that may reflect an interpretation of disease as a punishment for wrongdoing (thereby using suffering as evidence to infer guilt, as Job’s friends do). However, it is more likely, in my estimation, that the statement is intended to deter criminal behavior, since the text explicitly specifies that only those “who have clearly sinned” will be given to the death 133 133 lords, which suggests that the practice of ritual human sacrifice may have served a punitive function in addition to its religious purpose, a pre-Hispanic form of modern-day capital punishment designed to maintain societal order and peace through the exercise of controlled, state-sanctioned violence, in contrast with chaotic, unsanctioned violence (murder or sexual assault, for example). Ultimately, by vanquishing the death lords, the twins have made the world sufficiently safe for the emergence of human beings, for “they [the death lords] wanted only conflict with the people of ancient times. . . . They were strife- makers, traitors, tempters to sin and violence. . . . They were also masters of deception, . . . masters of harm and vexation” (188). Furthermore, by resurrecting the maize god, the twins have provided the primordial creator deities with the necessary material to create human beings. And finally, in ascending to the sky as the sun and the moon, they have made it possible for human life to flourish on earth, for there can be no maize crop without the nourishment provided by the sun, and there can be no human beings without the sustenance provided by the consumption of maize, which made up roughly 75% of the Maya diet and which the Maya believed was the very substance out of which they had been created by the gods. Accordingly, the Popol Vuh states that the flesh of the first human beings, the primordial ancestors, was “merely yellow ears of maize and white ears of maize.” Thus, the text states, “mere food was their flesh,” and it was this food that was required to feed the gods (Christenson 195).2 According to Cervantes, a deeper understanding of the Mesoamerican interpretation of sacrifice can be obtained by “considering the native belief that human flesh and maize were the same matter in different transformations. Since the transformations were cyclic

2 See Christenson 192-95. 134 134 and the cycles constantly in jeopardy, men’s actions, and human sacrifice in particular, played a crucial part in maintaining the balance” (43). In the end, the twins bring life from death in the resurrection of the maize god, making the creation of human beings possible, much like the god and culture hero Quetzalcoatl, who becomes the benefactor of human beings by descending into the underworld to retrieve the bones from which human beings are formed (by their mixture with the sacrificially offered blood of the gods) in a Central Mexican myth recorded in the Leyenda de los Soles and the Histoyre du Mechique (Taube, Aztec and Maya Myths 37-39). In renewing the maize crop through the resurrection of their father in the form of the maize god, the twins enable the creator gods to establish the interdependent divine-human relationship that is necessary to sustain the cosmos. Furthermore, the apotheosis of the twins results in the births of the sun and moon, and constitutes a shift from a time of suffering and starvation in darkness (recorded in the mytho-historical narrative of the final books), when the lords of death and disease have yet to be vanquished, to the time of the first dawn, which at last allows for the fertility and abundance that enables human life to flourish. By defeating the death lords, they make the world safe for humankind, putting the forces of death and disease in check. In performing rituals in imitation of the Hero Twins, such as playing the Mesoamerican ritual ballgame, Maya elites ritually renew the death-vanquishing effect of the twins and reactivate the restrictions placed upon the death lords through a principle of correspondence or “sympathetic magic” (as J. G. Frazer called it), lest they once again run rampant and unchecked. Ritual performance, therefore, not only feeds the gods and thus sustains the cosmos, but also keeps the forces of death and disease at bay, as much as it is possible to do so. In this final mythic episode, suffering is caused by the 135 135 death lords, and the Hero Twins are revered as culture heroes for defeating them and thus defeating death itself, becoming the immortal sun and moon as a result.

Conclusions From the mythic narratives of the Popol Vuh, there emerges a regenerative view of suffering that is confirmed by an abundance of extra-textual evidence found in various media throughout Mesoamerica. It should be noted, however, that a retributive view of suffering, the view that dominates much of the Hebrew Bible and is refuted by the poet-author of the dialogues of the book of Job, is also evident in certain episodes of the text: the fall of Vucub Caquix, the revenge of the animals in the creation myth, and the avenging of Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu by the Hero Twins all illustrate this retributive view. While it is difficult to speak of any ultimate origin of “evil” or suffering in the myths of the Popol Vuh, it is clear that the Xibalban death lords are the source of the sufferings caused by disease (and perhaps death as well), since the universal afterlife destination of the Maya (other than the few exceptions listed above) is the nine-leveled underworld of Xibalba, the “Place of Fright.” It is unclear, however, whence the death lords originated, how they came into being, and for what purpose they exist. Presumably they were created out of necessity by the primordial gods in accordance with the pan-Mesoamerican principle of an interdependent and necessary relationship between life and death, as discussed above, but this is at no point made explicit. It can be surmised, however, that suffering happens for a variety of reasons, as evidenced by the preceding analysis. Suffering often comes as a result of the malevolence of the death lords, as it does in the myth of their defeat by the twins. It also occurs as a result of a violation of the established social order (as it does in 136 136 the Vucub Caquix myth), and as a punishment from the gods for the failure of their creations to sustain them by means of the appropriate rites. Ultimately, however, suffering, through the practice of ritual sacrifice, comes to be regarded as a necessary sacrament that is absolutely essential for the greater good of the community. On one hand, the institution of sacrifice, whether through offerings of blood or lives (animal or human), serves to bolster the power of the state by promoting a willingness among its subjects to make sacrificial offerings, whether upon an altar of stone or by risking their lives on the battlefield. On the other hand, sacrificial practices were not limited to the populace. The practice of auto-sacrifice was a solemn duty of ruling elites, requiring them to act as shamanic intermediaries between the human and divine realms by regularly letting their own blood in painful ways for the purpose of propitiating the gods and attaining divine favor for the community, as evidenced by the lintels at Yaxchilán, for example.3 The belief that the phenomena of suffering and death are required to perpetuate life and to ensure the renewal of the cosmos constitutes a grand, unifying theme that is a prominent characteristic of pre-Hispanic religions. Furthermore, as an interpretive lens, it provides modern readers with a means to better appreciate these cultures, which live on in hybridized forms, and to cultivate a deeper understanding of the representations of violence (sacrificial and otherwise) and suffering that are preserved within their iconographic and textual traditions, among them the myths of the Popol Vuh.

3 See Schele & Miller 186-90.

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION – THE BOOK OF JOB AND THE POPOL VUH: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

The “Symbolism of Evil” At this point, it will perhaps prove useful to apply a theoretical framework from the field of comparative mythology in an attempt to determine points of correspondence as well as divergence. Paul Ricoeur’s “typology” of the “myths of the beginning and the end of evil,” derived from his analysis of the “symbolism of evil” in the Hebraic and Hellenic mythic traditions, assumes (like structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss) that the mythic symbols that the human mind is capable of generating are finite, and thus that correspondences can be found between the myths of disparate cultures that have had no historical contact. As Ricoeur explains, “I should like to think, as Cl. Levi-Strauss does in Tristes tropiques, that the images which the myth-making imagination and the institutional activity of man can produce are not infinite in number, and that it is possible to work out, at least as a working hypothesis, a sort of morphology of the principal images” (172). Based upon this “morphology of the principal images,” he establishes a typology of the various myths of evil in the history of western thought. According to this typology, myths that attempt to explain the existence of evil may be classified under the rubric of four distinct categories or types of myths, which he calls (1) “the drama of creation and the ‘Ritual’ vision of the world,” (2) “the wicked god and the ‘Tragic’ vision of existence,” (3) “the ‘Adamic’ myth and the eschatological vision of history,” and (4) “the myth of the exiled soul and salvation through knowledge.” Ricoeur sees the Adamic myth of the Fall as the “dominant” myth of evil in the West and distinguishes between myths wherein an “evil” committed leads to suffering that is justly earned (exemplified by the 138 138

Adamic myth) and those in which an evil that is suffered at the hands of a “wicked god” leads to an “unjust deprivation” (the Tragic vision of existence, exemplified by classical Athenian tragedy). As discussed in chapter 2, Ricoeur includes the book of Job in the “Tragic” category, interpreting it as a myth of unjust persecution by a wicked god. In his view, Job represents a corrective of the Adamic myth-type, which holds man responsible for the emergence of evil in the world, thus blaming the victim for the suffering that befalls him. This idea becomes further developed and crystallized in the later Christian doctrine of original sin, formulated by Augustine and others based upon the writings of Paul, by which the stain of primordial disobedience is inherited by the descendants of the first human couple, not entirely unlike the eastern doctrine of found in various sects of Hinduism and Buddhism, which interprets suffering as a just recompense for deeds committed in the course of one’s previous lifetimes. But what, if anything, can Ricoeur’s typology elucidate about the myths contained within the Popol Vuh? In applying this typology to the Popol Vuh, the present study seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How do the views of “evil” and suffering suggested by these myths compare to and contrast with those found in Ricoeur’s typology? (2) Does Ricoeur’s typology suffice to adequately explicate the myths addressed? Do the myths suggest an additional category that is lacking in Ricoeur’s typology? Do they suggest an alternative paradigm? And, (3) At the risk of making sweeping generalizations, what (if any) tentative inferences can be made about the distinctions between the collective mythologies of the “Old World” cultures featured in Ricoeur’s analysis and the New World cultures of pre- Hispanic Mesoamerica featured in the present study? What commonalities can be found in the myths of these cultures? And, more importantly, what do their 139 139 differences seem to suggest about the distinct worldviews of their respective authors?

“Evil” in Ancient Israel and Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica Perhaps surprisingly, Ricoeur’s text is one of few analyses of its kind. Thus, though its limitations should be recognized, it remains a useful tool for the comparative study of myths of suffering (or “evil,” in Ricoeur’s formulation). However, the problem with employing the word “evil” in the context of pre- Hispanic Mesoamerican belief systems is that it connotes certain culturally specific metaphysical and theological associations that are misleading in this context. Laurence Alexander argues that the concept of “evil per se” (i.e., absolute evil, as found among the apocalyptic faiths and familiar to westerners through Christianity) is an Old World conception that was nonexistent in pre-Hispanic Maya society. Therefore, he contends, it was introduced to the Maya by the Spanish, an imposition with disastrous consequences (namely, the upheaval of native cosmology). As Alexander explains, There are symbolizations of malignant spirits in Maya myth, but these are not of the same cosmological class as the ancient gods. Al Puch, the death god, was not expressly evil, that is, malignant; he was one of many personified gods of the ancient Maya and does not really represent any active or identifiable force of evil per se in the Maya world. Thus, we cannot discover symbolizations of the type that Ricoeur leads us to expect. . . . [T]here cannot be representations of evil per se as Ricoeur defines them because evil is something other, something separated, alienated from this world. Such a representation would be incomprehensible to the ancient Maya. (7) 140 140

Like Al Puch (a Postclassic moniker for the principal Maya death god, who does not appear in the ancient Hero Twins myth cycle), the Xibalban death lords too are malignant but are of a lesser “cosmological class” than the creator gods of the K’iche’ cosmogony described in the creation myth of the Popol Vuh. In other words, they are supernatural beings of a class between humans and the glorified gods of creation. Fernando Cervantes independently affirms Alexander’s argument, explaining that such concepts [“evil and the devil”] were alien to the Mesoamerican mind. In contrast with the typically western conception of evil . . . , the Mesoamerican notions of evil and the demonic were inextricably intertwined with their notions of good and the divine. Evil and the demonic were in fact intrinsic to the divinity itself. . . . Mesoamerican deities represented both benevolence and malevolence, creativity and destructiveness. (40-41) Ironically, Alexander contends, the Spanish themselves came to represent the embodiment of evil in the consciousness of the Maya during the Colonial Period, a claim supported by various native accounts of the conquest, such as the following passage derived from the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (ca. 17th – 18th century CE): It was only because these priests of ours were to come to an end when misery was introduced, when Christianity was introduced by the real Christians. Then with the true God, the true Dios, came the beginning of our misery. It was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of strife with purse- snatching, the beginning of strife with blow-guns, the beginning of strife by trampling on people, the beginning of robbery with 141 141

violence, the beginning of forced debts, the beginning of debts enforced by false testimony, the beginning of individual strife, a beginning of vexation. (Roys 30) In the above passage, the “foreigners,” the “real Christians” with their “true God, the true Dios,” have replaced such mythical figures as Al Puch and the Xibalban death lords as the primary source of misery and suffering among the indigenous community. Furthermore, the suffering produced by these outsiders serves no productive purpose; it affects no renewal. Therefore, it is wholly external to the regenerative cosmological system of the Maya. As in the case of ancient Israel’s mythic vision of the primordial garden of Eden, here too, in the midst of crisis, the past is reinterpreted as an idyllic time, much like the biblical garden and the Greek golden age: There was then no sickness; they had then no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no abdominal pains; they had then no consumption; they had then no headache. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came; . . . No lucky days were then displayed to us. (Roys 33) In Alexander’s view, the Spanish brought not only smallpox and venereal disease to the Maya, but also the “equally destructive . . . concept of sin, of guilt, and of retribution from on High” (8). This “new symbolization,” he writes, “exploded on the scene of Maya religious cosmology”: The Spaniards did not introduce violence and cruelty to the Maya; these things existed in plenty. But they did introduce a new imagery, a new symbolization previously unknown to the Maya. . . . For with 142 142

this new symbolism, the Spanish brought a new imagery, a symbolic order of apocalypse and revelation unknown to the Maya. For the world of the Maya was essentially a timeless world; like the Maya long count calendar (the katun calendar), the world of the Maya repeated itself eternally in time. But the cut across this symbolization of time; it insisted on a linear symbolism, on a symbolism of beginning, and, most importantly, of ending and of apocalypse. For this new symbolization the Maya were totally unprepared, and the consequences were disastrous for Maya culture. (8) Similarly, Cervantes convincingly argues that the religious cosmology of Native Americans in “New Spain” was challenged by the introduction of the dualistic Christian theology (the binary opposition of god and the devil) into the existing paradigm of indigenous religions, detailing how Native Americans reinterpreted the views of the Spanish missionaries sent to stamp out diabolism and convert the indigenous population to the Christian faith. Such notions, he explains, were “an absurdity in Mesoamerican thought,” since destruction was understood to be necessary for creation and, likewise, creation for destruction (42). Like the Maya, the Mexica too responded to their brutal destruction, subjugation, and enslavement by these foreign invaders with resounding cries of lament. For example, one native account reads, Broken spears lie in the road; / we have torn our hair in grief. / The houses are roofless now / and their walls are red with blood. / Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas, / . . . / We have pounded our hands in despair against the adobe walls, / for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead. / . . . / They set a price on all 143 143

of us: / on the young men, the priests, the boys and girls. / The price of a poor man was only two handfuls of corn, / . . . / everything that was once precious was now considered worthless. (Leon-Portilla 137-38) One finds striking parallels between native accounts such as those above and similar accounts recorded in the poetic lamentations of the Hebrew Bible, those regarding the siege of Judah, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the deportation to Babylon. Indeed, such comparison might constitute a fruitful area of study in its own right. Finally, perhaps most telling of the Spanish embodiment of evil in the eyes of the indigenous population is the fact that these invaders were “occasionally . . . even identified with tzitzimime, the demonic stars of Mesoamerican mythology, the sun’s enemies and monsters of death and destruction who at the end of time would descend to kill and eat the last of mankind” before the next creation (Cervantes 45). Perhaps surprisingly, this pre-Hispanic lack of any conception of absolute evil is shared by the book of Job, and indeed by virtually the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, except perhaps for the primordial watery chaos represented by Leviathan and Rahab (a name for and symbolic representation of Egypt), but even these mythical beings are described in Job and elsewhere as being subdued and vanquished by YHWH (e.g., Job 9.13, 26.10 – 14, 40.25 – 41.26; Isa. 27.1, 51.9 – 10; Ps. 74.13 – 14, 89.10 – 11).1 Similarly, the adversary of Job is conceived as an agent of YHWH, and enemy armies are understood to be instruments of divine punishment. Therefore, evil in its absolute sense is a term equally inapplicable to the myths of ancient Israel.

1 See also Jewish Study Bible 888n4, 1538n4, and 1559n4. 144 144

In the traditional ancient Israelite view of suffering (the retributive view), all circumstances, both good and “evil,” derive from YHWH, who is variously conceived as a loving creator (as in the dual creation myths of Gen. 1.1 – 3.24); a protective liberator (as in the myth of the Exodus and the social justice rhetoric of the prophets); a divine sovereign (throughout the Pentateuch); and a jealous and vengeful, yet conditionally forgiving, husband (as in the numerous vehement condemnations of idolatry in the prophetic literature and the Deuteronomistic history).2 Thus, according to this theology, YHWH is alone responsible for both good and “evil,” as evidenced, for example, by the following biblical verses: “Can misfortune come to a town if the LORD has not caused it?” (Amos 3.6); “Is it not at the word of the Most High, / That weal and woe befall?” (Lam. 3.37 – 8); and, “I am the LORD and there is none else, / I form light and create darkness, / I make weal and create woe— / I the LORD do all these things” (Isa. 45.6b – 7). For this reason, referred to YHWH as “both a persecutor and a helper in one” (7). In Jung’s view, “Yahweh is not split but is an antinomy—a totality of inner opposites,” containing within him both positive and negative attributes (7). Accordingly, Jung read the gō’ēl as an aspect of God rather than a third party, thus paradoxically reasoning that “Yahweh is also man’s advocate against himself when man puts forth his complaint,” a seemingly schizophrenic portrait of the deity (7). As in Job, this monistic understanding of God asserts the omnipotence of the patron god of the ancient Israelites but does so at the cost of omnibenevolence. According to this theology, YHWH may not be omnibenevolent, but he is just. Thus, as in the Deuteronomistic view, all suffering that occurs, whether individual

2 See, for example, the “marriage metaphor” in Hosea. 145 145 or collective, is deemed to be the result of disobedience to covenantal laws and is thereby justified. This perspective evidences a collective (rather than an individualistic) mentality, by which the entire community must be punished for the violations of a specific subset of the population. This collective mentality is shared by the pre-Hispanic worldviews of Mesoamerica as well, as evidenced most prominently by the subordination of the interests of the individual to the greater good of the community in the practice of sacrifice. Such retributive and collectivistic attitudes do not hold unchallenged sway throughout the entirety of ancient Israelite scripture however, for one of the features of the Hebrew Bible that contributes to its astounding complexity is the fact that it contains within it a plurality of voices evincing numerous, at times conflicting, perspectives. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, ancient Israelite literature such as the books of Job and Qoheleth, for example, refute this retributive understanding of God and his relationship to the experience of suffering, however distinct these texts may be among the polyvocal compilation of competing perspectives and theologies contained within the library of ancient Israelite texts that is the Hebrew Bible. A much later inter-testamental development, which promotes the adversary of Job to the role of divine adversary and antithesis of God (the embodiment of absolute evil known today by the proper name “Satan”), redeems YHWH (by this time the sole god of monotheistic Yahwism) from charges of divine injustice (the case presented by the poetic Job) by transforming him as well through the formulation of new theological understandings of the divine. According to Russell, “Satan is the personification of the dark side of God, that element within Yahweh which obstructs the good” (176-77). Gradually, this “dark side” becomes detached and dissociated from God and eventually displaced onto the figure of Satan as he becomes an increasingly prominent presence. Thus, Russell explains, “the Hebrew 146 146 concept of the Devil developed gradually, arising from certain tensions within the concept of Yahweh” (174). In effect, this theological development reduces the god of the ancient Israelites to the embodiment of absolute good, thereby limiting his domain and establishing a dichotomy of binary opposition, in which Satan gradually replaces YHWH as the sole source of suffering and eventually becomes the apotheosis of evil, the angelic scapegoat and author of sin in the subsequent Jewish and Christian traditions.3 It is from this perspective that the serpent of Genesis 2.4b – 3.24, which the text simply describes as a snake, comes to be reinterpreted as Satan in disguise, an identification later reflected in the symbolic language of the Apocalypse of John: “The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (New Oxford Annotated Bible, Rev. 12.9). As mentioned in chapter 2, this development evidently occurs as a result of Zoroastrian influence during the Persian (Achaemenid) period (539–332 BCE), after the conquest of the neo- Babylonian empire by Cyrus II. It is undisputed that “Persian rule . . . allowed considerable cultural assimilation and religious syncretism,” though the extent of the influence of “Persian dualism, which posited the existence of two primal and independent personifications of good and evil,” on post-exilic Judaism remains a subject of scholarly debate (Cook 583; Avalos 679).4 Similarly, the myths of the Popol Vuh contain no concept of absolute evil. The Xibalban death lords are clearly malignant and may thus be considered a source of “evil” (indeed, the Hero Twins charge them with murder and arbitrary death-dealing), for all manner of diseases (and the sufferings that they produce)

3 See Breytenbach & Day and Russell.

4 See Cohn 220-31. 147 147 clearly derive from these figures. However, the forces that they represent are not entirely destroyed by the Hero Twins because they are deemed necessary functionaries of the cosmic cycle of renewal. Thus, though their powers are limited by the twins, the lives of most of these beings are ultimately spared and they remain free to exercise these destructive powers in the human realm, albeit in a limited fashion. While suffering itself was considered tragic when it occurred outside of the context of ritual time and space, the controlled suffering produced within the ritual context of pre-Hispanic ceremonial centers was deemed moral due to its positive effects: namely, the renewal of the gods and the cosmos. In this way, it was understood as a sacrificial gift not only to the gods but to the entire human community as well. As a method of comparison of the individual texts in discussion, it will perhaps prove fruitful to examine the theological and anthropological views that are suggested by each, along with the application of Ricoeur’s typology. Thus, the following analysis will attempt to determine what each text implies about the nature of God or the gods (its theological views) and the nature of human beings (its anthropological views), based upon the conclusions drawn from the preceding chapters.

Theological Views Throughout the book of Job (until the theophany, at least), God is portrayed as a divine tyrant who refuses to accept responsibility for human suffering. He is the ultimate totalitarian dictator, free to exercise absolute power without restraint. Because he is omnipotent and possesses vast, cosmic knowledge (though he apparently needs to test human beings in order to determine how they will respond), YHWH has no one to answer to for his actions and thus considers 148 148 himself exempt from criticism. This god is indeed powerful, but he cannot rightfully be called either good or just because, by his very nature, he is a transcendent being and therefore exists outside of the confines of such human categories as goodness and justice. According to the theophany, and Job’s acceptance of it, the nature of the deity cannot be expressed with reference to such anthropic constructs. He is a transcendent deity, rather than an anthropopathic one, and is therefore unknowable and inconceivable by the limited faculties of the human mind. Job, on the other hand, is adamant in his emphasis on the ethical norms of ancient Israelite society rather than its traditional theological norms. He acknowledges the injustice of his suffering, even if YHWH refuses to. In this way, Job acts as a foil of YHWH, highlighting his unethical behavior by contrast. Thus, the myth of Job corresponds to Ricoeur’s Tragic myth-type because it is YHWH and the adversary in tandem (wicked gods), rather than Job himself, who are responsible for the sufferings caused, while Job’s friends heap further persecution onto his affliction. Thus, Job imagines an advocate and vindicator (a gō’ēl) who might speak in his defense (as his friends fail to do) in a trial with God, vindicate him of all charges, and perhaps even avenge him for the heinous injustice committed against him by the divine. Though Job’s eventual submission to YHWH suggests that the interpretation of God’s behavior as cruel and unjust is an inadequate and ignorant understanding of the true transcendent nature of God, the fact remains that YHWH’s treatment of Job was (by human standards) indeed unjust and thus unjustifiable. In contrast, the creator gods of the Popol Vuh are conceived not as divine rulers but as divine parents who, like the god of Job, unjustly destroy the various pre-human creatures (Ricoeur’s Tragic myth-type) in the process of creating 149 149 human beings. However, it is clear that from the perspective of the text, this is done in the service of a greater good. Furthermore, these gods, in some myths, sacrifice their own blood or lives for the benefit of humankind, as the Hero Twins do to create the sun and the moon and as numerous deities do in the corpus of Mexica myth.5 Like YHWH, the gods of the Popol Vuh possess the life-giving powers of creation and fertility, but unlike YHWH they are apparently only semi- potent, for they require the tribute of human beings as nourishment, whether through the honor of remembrance and verbal praise (as in the creation myth) or through the sacrifice of human blood and bodies (as in the sacrificial nourishment of Tohil in the later mytho-historical narrative). Perhaps of paramount importance in this ritual system is the unyielding devotion that such sacrifices display, and the suffering that they generate, suffering that increases the value of the sacrifice. Here, it should be noted that YHWH too requires sacrificial tribute throughout the Hebrew Bible, including a demand in the “Covenant Code” (Exod. 22.28 – 30) evidently requiring the sacrifice of the firstborn and another instance in which he inspires such sacrifices out of spite, for the purpose of “horrifying” those who have committed idolatry and not kept the Sabbath (Ezek. 20.26). The former example may be read as a dedication rather than a sacrifice, since the eighth day is associated with circumcision, but the parallel offerings of animals problematizes such a reading. Elsewhere, on the other hand, such practices are expressly forbidden, as in the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus (18.21).6 Many of the prophetic books as well as those of the Deuteronomistic history vehemently condemn the practice of human sacrifice as a form of idolatry, and thus a violation

5 See also chapter 4.

6 See also Deut. 18.10 – 13. 150 150 of covenantal law (e.g., 1 Kings 11.4 – 11; 2 Kings 23.10; Jer. 7.30 – 34, 19.1 – 5, 32.30 – 35).7 These condemnations suggest that such rites were in fact performed among certain of the peoples of ancient Israel, for the explicit purpose of these condemnations is the extirpation of an existent practice. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, this practice is invariably associated with idolatry and punished by divine retribution. As in the mythic traditions of the Hebrew Bible, the retributive view of suffering is clearly present among the myths of the Popol Vuh as well. The death lords of the Popol Vuh are justly punished by the Hero Twins for crimes of deceit and murder, rendering their suffering retributive and thus analogous to Ricoeur’s Adamic myth-type. The slaughter of the twin fathers of the Hero Twins by the death lords is unacceptable because it is enacted not for the purpose of honoring and paying tribute to the gods but for personal gain, which constitutes a violation of proper social conduct. Similarly, Vucub Caquix is righteously punished for his hubristic violation of the social order, which also corresponds to the Adamic myth-type. Thus, these myths serve to discourage such behaviors, and therefore to implicitly promote their opposite by contrast, through the negative examples of the death lords and Vucub Caquix and the righteous self-sacrificial behavior of the Twins, who punish wrongdoers and ultimately offer their lives for the greater good of the cosmos, the gods, and the creation of human beings. In addition to the theme of retribution that is characteristic of the Adamic myth-type, the myths involving the death lords correspond to another of Ricoeur’s myth-types as well. As noted above, the death lords are supernatural beings separate from, and of a lesser order than, the creator deities of the creation myth.

7 See also 2 Chron. 28.1 – 5 and 33.1 – 6. 151 151

They constitute a source of suffering wholly other than that of either gods or men. Thus, the death lords episodes of the Hero Twins cycle, though unique in their details, roughly correspond to Ricoeur’s first myth-type: the drama of creation, by which the cosmos is engendered through theomachy (divine combat, from the Greek ϑεοί, meaning “gods,” and μάχη, meaning “battle”) between the gods and the forces of chaos, often personified in the form of a monstrous serpent, crocodile, dragon, sea monster, or other mythical beast.8 This myth-type constitutes a common mythic motif (known by the German term Chaoskampf, meaning “struggle against chaos”) among the myth cycles of various peoples of the ancient Near East and elsewhere in the Old World, such as the Ugaritic epic known as the “Baal Cycle,” which includes one such symbolic cosmogonic battle between the eponymous storm god and a deity called Yam, the personification of the sea.9 This myth-type is recognized by scholars as bearing close resemblance to certain verses of the Hebrew Bible, suggesting the likely possibility of influence through diffusionism (e.g., Job 9.13, 26.10 – 14, 40.25 – 41.26; Isa. 27.1, 51.9 – 10; Ps. 74.13 – 14, 89.10 – 11).10 For example, the Babylonian cosmogony recorded in the Enûm Eliš (ca. 18th – 16th century BCE) features the destruction of the personification of primordial chaos in the form of the serpentine goddess Tiamat (the sea) by the patron sky god Marduk (associated, like Baal and other such culture heroes, with rain and storms), who fashions the heavens and the earth from her bisected body,

8 See also Cohn 105-15; Day, God’s Conflict; and Kushner on Jon Levenson’s “combat theory” in Book of Job 178-80.

9 On the Chaoskampf motif, see Day, God’s Conflict.

10 See Alster; Bottéro 206-07; Day, God’s Conflict; and Jewish Study Bible 888n4, 1538n4, and 1559n4. 152 152 thus engendering the cosmos and establishing the patriarchal order of Babylon (Dalley 253).11 Like Leviathan, Tiamat is symbolically associated not with the life-sustaining fresh water of rivers and rain, which represent fertility and abundance, but with the chaotic, destructive power of the sea. The primordial waters of Genesis 1, which God (or the gods: ĕlōhîm, a plural word that may be suggestive of or, alternatively, may constitute an application of the “majestic plural” to a singular deity) separates to create the heavens and the earth, have been interpreted by some scholars as an analogous description of a state of formless chaos before the ordering of creation, while the mythical Leviathan evidences clear parallels to such figures as Yam and Tiamat.12 Similarly, the death lords of the Popol Vuh represent the destructive forces of chaos that must be subdued by the Hero Twins before the creation of human beings can be brought to fruition. The Twins, like Baal, Marduk, and other such divine chaos-vanquishers, are culture heroes who ensure the possibility of an ordered creation by conquering an anarchic threat. Furthermore, the death lords—not unlike Yam, Baal, Leviathan and Rahab, Tiamat, Jörmungandr (also called the Midgard Serpent) of Norse- Icelandic myth, Vṛtra of Vedic myth, and numerous others—are associated with water, a mythic symbol signifying not only life and fertility but also disorder and destruction. Accordingly, the death lords occupy the underworld, conceptualized as a watery realm whose rivers flow with blood, a detail that again (like its comparative analogues) constitutes a concrete symbol for the chaos that threatens to disrupt or overthrow the order and stability of life. In this case, however, the parallel symbolism is not the result of descent from common Proto-Indo-European

11 See also Alster, Black & Green 177, Jacobsen 178-80, Kelly 8-11, and Matthews & Benjamin 17.

12 See Day, God’s Conflict. 153 153 ancestry, the accepted explanation for the prevalence of Chaoskampf myths among various Old World cultures, but rather is likely a result of the Maya association of rainfall with caves and sinkholes, both of which were considered portals to the underworld. In the case of the Maya of Yucatán, these sacred sinkholes (today called cenotes, derived from the Yucatecan Maya tz’onot), such as the famous Cenote Sagrado (the “Sacred Cenote” or “Well of Sacrifice”) of Chichén Itzá, were considered portals by which sacrificial offerings of precious treasures as well as human lives could be made to rain deities called Chaacs, primarily the principal deity among them, the rain god Chaac, cognate of the Mexica Tlaloc (Carrasco, “Cenotes”; Miller & Taube, “Cenotes” and “Chac” 58-60).13

Anthropological Views In the theophany of Job, the omnipotent YHWH asserts the insignificance of human beings and their sufferings in the vast arena of creation, suggesting that the divine perspective on suffering is one of cosmic indifference and that the divine philosophy regarding power is akin to the brutal creed “might makes right.” Job seems to affirm the former view (human insignificance and cosmic indifference) in his response to the theophany, in which he humbly acknowledges his smallness and ignorance. Here, he is metaphorically reduced to “dust and ashes,” his creation symbolically reversed and undone by his recognition of human insignificance and ephemerality as he anticipates a return to the dust of the earth out of which the first ancestor was formed (Gen. 2.7), though the poet may or may not be alluding to this myth. Thus, on the point of human insignificance, the book of Job seems to agree with the philosophy of the theophany, as attested to by Job’s humble submission, and yet Job defiantly asserts his significance throughout the

13 See Miller & Taube, “Cenotes” and “Chac” 58-60. 154 154 debate through his poetic rhetoric of protest and legal indictment, which effectively summons YHWH down from the divine sphere of the heavens and into the human sphere on the earthly . Job’s outcry, then, seems to counter the philosophy of the theophany, constituting a positive affirmation of humanity despite the cosmic indifference asserted by YHWH. Distinctly, the Popol Vuh attributes a far greater significance to human beings, who play a participatory role in the cosmos, upon which the continuity of both the gods and life itself depend. The fact that the gods require sustenance provided by human beings implies the paramount significance of humanity in the grand scheme of the creation, for without the participation of human beings via the ritual performance of the appropriate rites of renewal the gods would go unnourished and would perhaps perish, though it is unclear precisely what such a lack would entail. Furthermore, the cosmos itself would be undone, the sun lacking the fuel required to continue its perpetual motion through the heavens. The world would thus be returned to the primordial time of darkness before the first dawn was produced by the efforts of the Hero Twins. The Popol Vuh, then, grants human beings primacy in creation while Job seems to deny human beings this importance, in contrast to the vast majority of the corpus of the Hebrew Bible, which instead affirms it. For example, in the first creation account of Genesis 1.1 – 2.3, God grants the primordial couple dominion over the earth and all of its creatures, while the covenant relationship between YHWH and his chosen people suggests that they hold a unique position in the favor of the divine, as discussed in chapter 2. Similarly, in the Popol Vuh, animals are “made to serve” man by offering their bodies to be slaughtered, just as human beings must offer their flesh and blood to the gods in propitiation. This reveals the supreme significance of man as an integral part of a continuous, ongoing process 155 155 of creation, in contrast to the explicit philosophy of Job, in which God’s creation is complete and man is denied a significant position within it, though the text seems to implicitly disprove this claim by the example of Job’s standoff with YHWH. Finally, while various individual myths of the Popol Vuh correspond to certain of Ricoeur’s myth-types, there exists no corollary in Ricoeur’s typology for the overarching regenerative view of suffering that informs the entire text when read as a unified whole and understood in the context of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican religions. The idea that suffering itself, if produced in the proper ritual context and for the purpose of displaying devotion to the gods, can affect the renewal of the cosmos is a unique perspective in the traditional discourse on the problem of suffering. It is this view that extends the practice of ritual sacrifice beyond the mere economics of sacrificial exchange, a system in which the primary function of sacrifice is propitiatory rather than participatory. Propitiation was surely a component of such practices in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, but within the context of a participatory worldview, the effects of sacrificial suffering consisted of more than the mere acquisition of goods (e.g., rain, a bountiful harvest, general prosperity, or victory in battle) or services (e.g., the alleviation of collective suffering by some worldly cause, whether drought, famine, epidemic, or conquest). Such propitiation constitutes a mere utilitarian transaction that subordinates the interests of the individual (the sacrificial “victim”) to the collective interests of the community. In addition to this propitiatory function, however, was the regenerative function discussed in chapters 4 and 5. It is this function that reveals a view of suffering as both necessary and life-affirming rather than gratuitous and life- denying. It is in these terms that sacrificial suffering was viewed positively, even while its secular corollary was considered anathema requiring punitive action in 156 156 response. Thus, the two were not equivalent in the pre-Hispanic consciousness, and to abandon the practice of sacrifice would have resulted in disastrous consequences for both the divine and human spheres. It is for this reason, Cervantes explains, that the bans imposed upon indigenous religious practices (including sacrificial rites) by Europeans constituted a threat to the order of the cosmos, for if obeyed, the indigenous population believed, these prohibitions would “threaten to destroy the Mesoamerican corporate relationship with the supernatural and to bring about an end to the present cosmos and a return to the original chaos” (43). Furthermore, the replacement of the indigenous gods by a new single omnibenevolent deity (the Christian god) neglected the necessity of the interplay between the binary forces of chaos and order and thus constituted “an explosive liability which put the whole cosmic order in extreme peril” (Cervantes 42).

Texts of Protest: A Departure and a Return The present study has surveyed a number of distinct responses to the universal problem of suffering, a dilemma that crosses all cultural boundaries, both temporal and geographic. The study began with the greater good defense of Christian apologetics (including the soul-making theodicy of Irenaeus) and the free will defense of Augustine (which interprets suffering caused by moral evils as a necessary condition of human freedom) before briefly discussing an apocalyptic view of suffering evidenced in the example of Christian eschatology (chapter 1). Chapters 2 and 3 consisted of an analysis of various ancient Israelite perspectives, including an interpretation of suffering as a divine test of faith in the prose framework of Job, conflicting interpretations of suffering as divine retribution and divine injustice in the poetic dialogue, and a view of suffering as an ineffable 157 157 mystery inaccessible to human beings and known only to the transcendent god of the theophany. Finally, chapters 4 and 5 surveyed various K’iche’ Maya perspectives evidenced in the Popol Vuh, which consisted of an interpretation of suffering as a necessary condition of creation (a kind of greater good) in the cosmogony, an interpretation of suffering as a form of just retribution in the Vucub Caquix and death lords episodes, an understanding of suffering as cosmic conflict between opposing (yet interdependent) supernatural forces (a view similar in kind yet subtly distinct from the apocalyptic view), and an overarching view of suffering as a necessary offering to the gods for the purpose of sustenance and the renewal of the cosmos. After assessing all of these perspectives through textual analysis of various ancient Israelite and pre-Hispanic Maya myths, it is clear that the mythopoetic (myth-making) process serves a logopoetic (meaning-making) function, and thus constitutes a powerful means by which people make sense of suffering and generate meaning from the raw material of life’s hardships. Furthermore, the literary imagination, as an extension of this mythopoetic process, constitutes a tool by which traditional mythic understandings of the past (those concerning the meaning and nature of God or the gods, the cosmos, human beings, and the experience of suffering) are renegotiated and reinterpreted for the present. This process of reinterpretation is evident in Job, a literary text that appropriates an antecedent mythic narrative (the pious folktale of the prose) in order to challenge its traditional understandings of God and suffering. The Popol Vuh, on the other hand, represents the opposite: an attempt to preserve traditional understandings of the gods, cosmos, and suffering amid the imminent threat of their extinction. Thus, both texts can be seen as a form of protest against the oppressive conditions of the respective cultural-historical contexts in which they were written. While Job 158 158 attempts to forge new understandings as a means of liberation from the persecution represented by a worldview deemed oppressive, the Popol Vuh returns to the mythic imagination of the past as a means of liberation from the persecutions of the conquest and the suppression of traditional belief systems that had imbued indigenous life with meaning and purpose for millennia. When viewed through this lens of the liberating potential of myth and literature, both texts can be understood in terms of their discursive movement. Job constitutes a refutation and a rejection that pushes away from the old views from within the sphere of those traditions while the Popol Vuh constitutes a preservation that pulls toward the old views from outside the sphere of those traditions, from a position of spiritual exile amid the domination of the Spanish conquest. Thus, Job represents a departure from tradition while the Popol Vuh represents a return. For Job, the doctrine of divine retribution (a component of the traditional theology of the conventional Hebrew wisdom) constitutes an affront to justice and an unfair persecution of the innocent. Similarly, for the Popol Vuh, the new religion of Christianity, which denies indigenous religious traditions and thus indigenous cultural memory, constitutes a threat to the very collective identity of a people as well as a threat to the order of the cosmos, thus jeopardizing the stability and continuity of life itself. Though the views expressed within each text are distinct, the voices of their authors are united in protest. Both cry out to their readers from across the ages, their protests crystallized in the form of narratives constructed through the symbolic language of myth. From their ancient pages, they call for liberation from oppressive ideologies (whether traditional or alien), from persecution (whether from within or outside of one’s own community), and from suffering itself, the most urgent and timeless of human concerns—the tireless combatant of Homo 159 159 patiens. For this reason, they remain relevant and continue to speak to readers today, for now, as ever before, the god of Job gambles ceaselessly with human lives, and the Maya death lords are never sated. Despite the inevitable hardships of life, Homo patiens nobly perseveres, tasked with the challenge of forging meaning through the creative potential of myth and literature. Thus, Homo patiens is ever the “storytelling animal” (to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Gottschall), continuously forging and re-fashioning meaning in response to the problem of suffering and the uncertain purpose (or lack thereof) of existence.

The Problem of Suffering in Modern Thought The problem of suffering remains as significant as ever but has become increasingly difficult to resolve in the modern age. Since the Enlightenment, the history of western thought has borne witness to a general shift in emphasis from theodicy to anthropodicy, from concerns for cosmic justice projected outward onto God to concerns for human justice leveled squarely on the shoulders of human beings. As Heiman explains, “If one believes the world is ruled by a good and powerful father figure, it’s natural to expect his order to be comprehensibly just,” but when the evidence of history suggests otherwise, such expectations of cosmic justice are shattered, calling into question traditional understandings of God and his relationship to suffering (4-5). What remains is “a sadder but wiser era that has learned to live on its own” (5). According to Heiman, part of “the meaning of modernity” consists of a radical separation of “what earlier ages called natural and moral evils” as well as “an attempt to stop blaming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own” (4). As Heiman’s assessment suggests, certain events of human history have radically altered the conceptual landscape of the problem by challenging the 160 160 reliability of traditional theistic interpretations of suffering, which has made it increasingly difficult for those hypotheses to be sustained when tested against the empirical evidence of human experience. These events include intellectual and cultural developments such as the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries; the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760 – ca. 1840 CE); the birth of Darwinism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis during the 19th century; the advent of philosophical movements such as , absurdism, and secular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and an overall trend toward the increasing secularization of western civilization as a result of these developments. Equally significant have been the unfathomable sufferings produced by the horrors of the modern age, among them two World Wars, the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and ongoing conflicts in Darfur, Uganda, and the Middle East, to name but a few prominent examples. Indeed, a number of eminent theologians (most famously Richard Rubenstein) have commented on the difficulty of “doing theology” (i.e., talking about God, especially the god of Abraham) in a post-Holocaust world, a world “after Auschwitz.” In an effort to clarify this trend in post-Holocaust Jewish theology in particular, Zachary Braiterman has employed the term “anti-theodicy” to refer to “the refusal to justify, explain, or accept as somehow meaningful the relationship between God and suffering,” a trend that reflects the inability of traditional theological understandings of God and suffering to adequately explain the of human experience in the modern world and, perhaps even more significantly, to fulfill the needs of people living and struggling for meaning within that world, with its manifold sufferings and apparent lack of transcendental 161 161 purpose (31). Thus, the modern era, arguably largely as a result of these events, has witnessed a general decline in religious faith among certain populations, while the proliferation of religiosity among others continues to reflect basic human desires for meaning, comfort, and consolation, particularly in times of need (i.e., hardship and pain). While events such as those mentioned above have undoubtedly contributed to the general decline of faith and the rise of secularism in the West, recent years have also witnessed a revival of religious , a phenomenon that perhaps suggests, as Heiman contends, not only that people “want easy answers to the problems of a complex world” (an assertion that she considers both “condescending” and “shortsighted” in its simplicity) but also that they “want worldviews that express moral standpoints: that human dignity is a good which cannot be bartered, that some actions are so vile they cannot be redeemed” (xv). In Kushner’s estimation, the former trend (religious decline) is primarily due to disillusionment caused by the harsh realities of suffering in the world and the problem14 that it engenders for traditional theisms: “In the overwhelming majority of cases,” he writes, “people have lost faith in God because of Hitler; because of atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, and other countries; because of the untimely death of someone they loved; or because they look at the world, they listen to the news, and they cannot believe there is an all-powerful, benevolent deity in charge of things” (Book of Job 164). Thus, it is the problem of suffering that presents what is perhaps the greatest challenge (arguably even greater than ) to . Indeed, as Kushner comments, “it is hard to read of the Nazi treatment of Jews, Poles, gays, and other ‘inferior’ people and

14 See chapter 1. 162 162 still believe in God, unless, as C. S. Lewis warned us, tragedy leads people to conclude that God exists and he is a monster” (165). Perhaps an even more pertinent question than how to talk about God in a world after Auschwitz, however, is the question of how to respond (theologically or otherwise) to the problem of suffering in a world in which the atrocities of war, genocide, and persecution continue to occur daily across the globe, not to mention disease, starvation, and natural catastrophes that leave tremendous suffering in their wake. Most important of all is the need to respond to such crises with courage and compassion, regardless of whether it is possible to derive some greater existential meaning from them. Let us hope that the struggle to alleviate suffering the world over may provide meaning enough to sustain the endeavor. Collectively, all of the events listed above have forever altered (for better or for worse) the ways in which human beings think about themselves, the world in which they live, their relationship to that world, and their responsibility to each other. Furthermore, they have tested the storytelling animal’s resolve for meaning- making, a challenge to which modernist writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881 CE), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900 CE), (1883 – 1924 CE), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980 CE), (1913 – 1960 CE), and even pulp-fiction icon H. P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937 CE) have responded with admirable integrity and creativity. Like the poet-author of Job, these thinkers have used the literary imagination as a tool to reinterpret the mythic understandings of the past, at times appropriating and reimagining mythic narratives through the process of literary composition. For example, Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925) constitutes a modern analogue of Job that replaces the divine authority of God with the political authority of the modern totalitarian state and the akedah of Genesis 22 with the shameful, inhuman execution of Josef K. “like a dog” on a 163 163 symbolic sacrificial altar (231). Similarly, Camus’s essay (1942) re-envisions the tragic myth of an ancient Greek hero (condemned by the gods to push a boulder uphill for ) as an analogy for the plight of modern man, who labors in vain, performing the mundane and intrinsically meaningless tasks of modern life (such as the tedium of factory and office work), despite the fact that his efforts are all destined to be erased by death. Camus manages to derive a positive outlook from this scenario, however, concluding that “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” and “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” (121, 123). Even if it is not possible for the modernist to derive any sense of intrinsic, objective meaning from existence, he or she may find satisfaction, even joy, in the continuous process of endeavoring to create meaning where none can be discerned, despite the difficulty of this project. In the words of Sartre, modern man is “left alone, without excuse” in the absence of divinity, for with the figurative “death” of God, a collective intellectual transformation mostly famously proclaimed by Nietzsche in both The Gay Science (sec. 108, 125, 343) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue and sec. XXV), comes the dissolution of “all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven” (Existentialism 353). In other words, “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend on either within or outside himself,” since there is no longer any recourse to “a given and specific human nature” within oneself nor any divinely mandated absolute “values or commands [outside of oneself] that could legitimize [one’s] behavior” (353). Thus, in Sartre’s words, modern man is “condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the 164 164 moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does” (353).15 This radical freedom, unconstrained by the mind-forged manacles of traditional theisms and political ideologies, constitutes a burden as well as a boon because it tasks modern man (and woman) with a formidable challenge: the project of creating his or her own subjective meaning in the absence of any objective one. Thus, by pouring his efforts wholeheartedly into his passions, those higher ideals that transcend him (whether the joys of love, the pursuit of knowledge, or the creative arts, for example), Homo patiens endures even in the grim post-modern age, nobly striving for meaning against the odds as he has always done, whether staring into the illimitable void of meaninglessness or into the face of senseless suffering, the face that launched a thousand myths.

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study Limitations of the present study include its use of both the book of Job and the Popol Vuh as representative texts of entire traditions spanning millennia. Thus, it runs the risk of reducing the complexity of these traditions to broad generalizations and oversimplifications. Therefore, further research and analysis of additional textual materials is recommended for an increasingly detailed and nuanced view of the perspectives on suffering manifested in these traditions. To this effect, the hypothetical framework of the regenerative view of suffering (outlined in chapters 4 and 5) may be applied to other cases of pre-Hispanic myth in order to test its accuracy and to determine its applicability to other narratives of the extant canon of Mesoamerican literature. Fortunately, among the Maya world, this canon is ever expanding due to continuous hieroglyphic decipherment.

15 See also Being and Nothingness. 165 165

Therefore, there is much room for growth in this particular area of study, which has long been largely neglected by all but specialists working in the field of Mesoamerican studies. Additionally, a greater breadth and depth of inquiry into the trajectory of the problem of suffering in the post-modern world is required to shed further light onto the various distinct perspectives that have emerged in the wake of the 19th and 20th centuries, and to anticipate further responses to come in the present age.

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