Pelham, Abigail (2009) Conversations about chaos and order: making the world in the Book of Job. PhD thesis http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1318/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] CONVERSATIONS ABOUT CHAOS AND ORDER: MAKING THE WORLD IN THE BOOK OF JOB Abigail Pelham Submitted in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Theology and Religious Studies Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow April 2009 © Abigail Pelham, 2009 ABSTRACT Setting their sights on the splash thrown up by Leviathan in chapters 3 and 41, many interpreters have argued that the conflict between chaos and order, as embodied in combat mythology, is a theme in the Book of Job. Although I agree that issues related to chaos and order are central to the book, the assumption that any discussion of chaos and order must be related to combat mythology does not stand up to scrutiny. Order and chaos, I maintain, are broader terms. I define them as “how the world ought to be,” and “how the world ought not to be,” respectively. Using these broader, and, I think, more accurate definitions, the Book of Job can be read as a long discussion about chaos and order, without requiring that we identify characters as forces embodying chaos or order who fight each other for control of the world, an interpretation which is an over-simplification of what is going on in the book. As “how the world ought/ought not to be,” order and chaos are container terms, capable of being filled in a number of different ways. That is to say, we cannot look at Leviathan (or Tiamat) and extrapolate characteristics of chaos that are applicable across the board. Rather, what constitutes chaos or order will depend on the particular circumstances and point of view of the person doing the labeling. In this thesis, I identify three pairs of concepts around which chaos and order are commonly conceived: singularity/multiplicity, stasis/change, and inside/outside. Taking these pairs one at a time, I examine how the various characters in the Book of Job describe order and chaos. What emerges is not a dictum as to what constitutes order or chaos, but a number of possible visions of how the world ought and ought not to be, none of which is definitive. At the end of the “conversation about chaos and order” that is the Book of Job, both God and Job make strong bids for their right to “make the world,” by deciding how it ought and ought not to be. In his speeches from the whirlwind, God identifies himself as the world’s creator, presenting an ordered world that is vastly different from what Job presumes order to be. Regardless of how Job’s response to God in 42:6 is understood— and it is interpreted in a great number of ways—in the epilogue Job can be seen to make his own bid for creator status, as he proceeds to inhabit a world that bears no similarity to the world God has just described. Job’s epilogue-world denies the ultimate reality of God’s whirlwind-world, but God’s whirlwind-world casts doubt upon the reality of Job’s epilogue-world. In this way, the book ends ambiguously; it curves back on itself, and the discussion about the nature of chaos and order continues, both within the book and beyond. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………….……………………………………………………2 Preface: Some Metaphors Toward a Methodology………………………………..............4 CHAPTERS 1. Introduction: Defining Order and Chaos……………………........................................7 2. Order and Chaos as Singularity and Multiplicity at the Level of Character………….32 3: Order and Chaos as Singularity and Multiplicity with Regard to Behavior and Belief.............................................................................90 4: Order and Chaos as Related to Time: Stasis and Change…………………………...115 5: The Spatial Locations of Order and Chaos: Inside and Outside…………………….177 Conclusion: How Does it End?........................................................................................227 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….236 4 PREFACE: SOME METAPHORS TOWARD A METHODOLOGY “Verbs Slowed to a Standstill” “It’s not so much A Sunday Afternoon/ on the Island of La Grande Jatte as the point/ of order according to Seurat—/ that bits of light and color, oil paints/ aligned in dots become the moment caught,/ verbs stilled to a standstill, the life examined./ We step back wide-eyed for a better look” (Lynch, 1-7). So writes Thomas Lynch about Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting in his poem “Art History, Chicago.” In this preface I want to think about the way I work with biblical texts, and, in particular, with the Book of Job. What Lynch describes in the lines quoted above might serve as a metaphor for what I do. I want to say that there is something of a pointillist aesthetic to the way I approach the Joban text, or, at least, pointillism as mediated by Lynch, without whose mediation it would not occur to me to compare my writing with Seurat’s painting. It is Lynch’s claim that Seurat’s technique causes verbs to be slowed to a standstill, allowing life to be examined in a way that it could not if its regular speed were maintained that prompts me to suggest a connection between what I am doing and Seurat’s work. In my writing I attempt to slow the text and ideas about it down so that they can be more carefully examined. What is really happening as the story passes by? Are there things that can be seen in slow- motion that would not otherwise be noticed? Can we learn something new by thinking about the individual, component parts of the whole that we would never learn by looking at the whole on its own? I am not, however, talking about a reading that relies on an examination of technical details to the exclusion of the whole. It is the whole that interests me, but I want to know how that whole has been put together and whether, if dismantled, it might be put together in a different way. Fiction and the Book of Job This dismantling and rebuilding is a never-ending process, at least where the Book of Job is concerned. Peggy Day observes, “The book of Job seeks to inspire thought, to endorse complexity, ambiguity, and paradox…and because of this very dialogue between the work itself and its audience it is in the final analysis multivalent” (Day 1988, 70). Whoever I may be, I approach the book from my particular situation, with my peculiar brain and the spirals along which my thoughts move, and the book, in its ambiguity and complexity, opens itself up to my particular peculiarities. What a pair we make: it my 5 fantasy text and I its dream reader. Can our interaction be anything other than imaginary, and, because imaginary, illicit? Whenever I stop taking apart what I have put together, I have, in a sense, decided to create a fiction. In this thesis, I do make claims about what the Book of Job means. I haven’t finished thinking about Job, however, and, in the future, I will no doubt take apart at least some of what I have claimed here. In this thesis, then, I do not profess to offer “unequivocal answers” (Clines 1990, 106) to the meaning of the Book of Job, but, rather, to suggest possibilities. It is possible to interpret the book the way I have here, but this interpretation is also something of a fiction. It hangs in the air, seemingly substantial, but it is really a mirage, the way all possibility—because it is only what might be and not necessarily what is—is a mirage. But while it shimmers in the air, there is something worthwhile about it. It deserves its moment. “Playing Dostoevsky” Carol Newsom, in her article “Bakhtin, the Bible, and Dialogic Truth,” recommends an enterprise which she terms “‘playing Dostoevsky to the Bible’” (Newsom 1996, 305), by which she means bringing the various worldviews contained within the Bible into contact to allow them to quarrel and dialogue with each other. Newsom has already played a version of this game in her book The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, in which she takes seriously the positions represented by each of the characters and examines how they interact. In this thesis, I play another version of the game. In a way, my version is more structured. I listen in on the conversation around a particular topic—that of order and chaos, or, as I will define them in my introductory chapter, “how the world ought to be” and “how the world ought not to be”—viewing the topic from several different angles. I impose a kind of grid, into which the conversation can be fit and then try viewing the grid through different lenses. For this reason, the thesis circles around on several of the same passages, approaching them from different angles which yield differing interpretations. To play Dostoevsky is not, however, only to allow different points of view to converse with each other.