The Book of Job Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

The Book of Job Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts Edited by Vivian Liska Editorial Board Robert Alter, Steven Aschheim, Richard I. Cohen, Mark H. Gelber, Moshe Halbertal, Geoffrey Hartman, Moshe Idel, Samuel Moyn, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman, Bernd Witte Volume 1 The Book of Job Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics Edited by Leora Batnitzky and Ilana Pardes DE GRUYTER An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN 978-3-11-033383-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-033879-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039398-9 ISSN 2199-6962 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston Cover image: Source: http://www.zeno.org – Contumax GmbH & Co. KG Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgments This book had its beginnings in a conference on the Book of Job that was held at Princeton University in October 2012 as part of a collaborative project between the University of Antwerp, the Hebrew University, and Princeton Univer- sity. We are grateful to the Program of Jewish Studies and the Department of Religion at Princeton University for hosting the conference. We also wish to thank Jeremy Schreiber for his fine copy editing, Katja Lehming and De Gruyter Press for their support, and Vivian Liska for her energetic intellectual leader- ship on this book series. L. B. and I. P. Contents Acknowledgments v Leora Batnitzky and Ilana Pardes The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Hermeneutics 1 Ariel Hirschfeld Is the Book of Job a Tragedy? 9 Moshe Halbertal Job, the Mourner 37 Naphtali Meshel Whose Job Is This? Dramatic Irony and double entendre in the Book of Job 47 Yosefa Raz Reading Pain in the Book of Job 77 Ilana Pardes Melville’s Wall Street Job: The Missing Cry 99 Vivian Liska Kafka’s Other Job 123 Galit Hasan-Rokem Joban Transformations of the Wandering Jew in Joseph Roth’s Hiob and Der Leviathan 147 Robert Alter Hebrew Poems Rewriting Job 173 Freddie Rokem The Bible on the Hebrew/Israeli Stage: Hanoch Levin’s The Torments of Job as a Modern Tragedy 185 viii Contents Leora Batnitzky Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis 213 Notes on Contributors 225 Leora Batnitzky and Ilana Pardes The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Hermeneutics The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. What makes the Book of Job such a prominent text in modern literature and thought? Why has Job’s response to disaster become a touchstone for modern reflections on catastrophic events? What sort of answer (if any) can the Voice from the Whirlwind offer in a post- theological age? How have modern and postmodern thinkers and artists trans- lated Job’s social critique to address ethical and political concerns? What are the interrelations between traditional conceptions of Job as a parable and modern Joban parables? How does Job’s aesthetic legacy function as a key element in defining the cry of modern witnesses? To what extent can aesthetic inquiries within religious realms modify our perceptions of religious texts and religious experience – and, vice versa, to what extent does religion allow or compel us to open up the concept of the “aesthetic”? The Bible has not always been venerated as an aesthetic touchstone. The literary Bible emerged in the eighteenth century, in England and in Germany, as the invention of scholars and literati who tried to rejuvenate the Bible by transforming it from a book justified by theology to one justified by culture. The aim of this post-theological project was not quite to secularize the Bible – though it was now construed as the product of human imagination – but rather to reconstitute its authority in aesthetic terms. The Book of Job played a vital role in enhancing this transformation. Jonathan Sheehan goes so far as to trace what he calls a “Job revival” within the context of English and German Enlight- enment, a revival that included numerous new translations and scholarly studies of the text.1 Indeed, the Book of Job acquired so prominent a position as an aesthetic touchstone that Edmund Burke evoked it, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), as an exemplary text for the explora- tion of the sublime experience in its relation to power and terror. J. G. Herder, one of the German forerunners of the literary approach to the Bible, devoted an entire section of his renowned The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–1783) to Job. In response to Burke, Herder reinterpreted the sublimity of the Book of Job as pertaining to the realms of the heart, of vision, and of vivid 1 Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2005. 2 Leora Batnitzky and Ilana Pardes Oriental imagination. God’s whirlwind poem, for Herder, is the poetic epitome of Job, for like the Oriental descriptions of nature “it awakens a love, an interest, and a sympathy for all that lives.” What wretch, in the greatest tumult of his passions, in walking under a starry heaven, would not experience imperceptibly and even against his will a soothing influence from the elevating contemplation of its silent, unchangeable, and everlasting splendors. Sup- pose at such a moment there occurs to his thoughts the simple language of God, “Canst thou bind together the bands of the Pleiades,” etc. – is it not as if God himself addressed the words to him from the starry firmament? Such an effect has the true poetry of nature, the fair interpreter of the nature of God. A hint, a single word, in the spirit of such poetry often suggests to the mind extended scenes, nor does it merely bring their quiet pictures before the eye in their outward lineaments, but brings them home to the sympathies of the heart.2 Alongside the interest in Job’s sublimity in the age of Enlightenment and beyond, one can trace a growing preoccupation with the text’s genre. The pivotal question in this respect was whether the Book of Job should be defined as a tragedy. Robert Lowth, a prominent advocate of the literary Bible within the English context, included in his renowned De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum (1753) a substantive comparison of the poetic form of Job with that of Greek tragedy.3 Lowth compared Job with the tragedies of Sophocles and concluded that, de- spite certain similarities, the biblical work does not rely on the type of plot that would establish it as tragic. Defining the Book of Job as a tragedy became prominent in nineteenth- century biblical criticism. Thus, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht De Wette, in his Einleitung, regarded the Book of Job as a “Hebrew tragedy,” which unlike Greek tragedy represents “the tragic idea by words and thoughts, rather than by ac- tion.”4 Neither Lowth nor De Wette linked the tragic in Job to the question of impatience. Only in twentieth-century criticism does one find a consideration of Job as an impious tragic figure whose mode of suffering resembles that of tragic heroes in Greek drama, most notably in Richard B. Sewall’s reading of 2 Herder, J. G., ”God and Nature in the Book of Job” (from The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry), in: The Dimensions of Job: A Study and Selected Readings, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, Schocken Books, New York 1969, 154. 3 For a discussion of Lowth’s contribution to the rise of the literary Bible, see David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature: From 1700 to the Present Day, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, 59–73. 4 De Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht, A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament, Volume 2, trans. Theodore Parker, D. Appleton and Co., New York 1864, 555. The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Hermeneutics 3 Job in The Vision of Tragedy (1959), a reading that, interestingly, relies on Mel- ville’s Ahab.5 Among twentieth-century Jewish critics, however, the tendency was to re- ject any attempt to define the Book of Job as tragedy. Baruch Kurzweil, a prominent Israeli critic, sees no affinity whatsoever between the Greek tragic world- view and the belief in redemption, the very core of biblical monotheism. What is more, that Job has no flaws and is hailed as blameless actually renders him the antithesis of the Aristotelian designation of the tragic hero. A “biblical tragedy,” Kurzweil concludes, is not a possibility. The most influential avowal of tragedy within Jewish thought is that of George Steiner, in his Death of Tragedy (1961). Steiner’s opening declaration in this work revolves around the Book of Job: Tragedy is alien to the Judaic sense of the world. The book of Job is always cited as an instance of tragic vision.

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