The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations

The Book of Job is a feast of language. From the simple and beautiful language of the prose tale, to the verbal fireworks of the dialogue between Job and his friends, to the haunting beauty of the poem on wisdom and the sublime poetics of the divine speeches, this book provides an intense encounter with the aesthetic resources of Hebrew verbal art. We read it, however, not simply for its beauty but for the powerful way in which it examines fundamental issues of human experience in the world: the nature and limits of piety, the challenge posed by acute suffering, the nature of good and evil. In this brilliant new study, Carol Newsom illuminates the relation between the aesthetic forms of the book and the claims made by its various characters. Her innovative approach makes possible a new understanding of the unity of the book of Job; she rejects the dismantling of the book by historical criticism and the flattening of the text that characterizes certain final form readings. Additionally, she is able to rehabilitate the moral perspectives represented by certain voices of the book–perspectives that modern critics have often treated with disdain. By looking beneath the propositional claims of the characters into the metaphors and figures with which their arguments are framed, she reveals new dimensions of the issues that engage them. The result is a recognition that the argument going on in the book–not just between Job and his friends but between parts of the book itself–is much tighter and more complex than has been realized.