C10| Saturday/Sunday, August 17 - 18, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
BYADAMKIRSCH
P
SALM 19 promises
that “the judgments
of the Lord are true
and righteous alto-
gether.” But as Abra-
ham Lincoln knew when he used
that phrase in his Second Inaugural
Address, referring to the horren-
dous bloodshed of the Civil War,
judgments may be true and righ-
teous without being humanly com-
prehensible. That is the message of
the most disturbing book in the
Hebrew Bible, the Book of Job,
which has now received a bold new
English translation by the Israel-
based Bible scholar Edward Green-
stein.
Many people think of Job as the
archetypal man of faith, who
refuses to renounce God even
though he is subjected to harsh
trials. This may be technically true,
but it is far from the impression
left by a careful reading of the
book. What’s at stake is not
whether Job submits to God—he
does, because he has no choice—
but whether God really is true and
righteous. Does he use his infinite
power for good, or is he more like
a force of nature, incomprehensible
and often terrifying? The book’s
answer is by no means clear, and it
is a sign of the theological daring
of the Bible’s compilers that they
chose to canonize a text with such
transgressive potential.
Indeed, the story begins with
what looks like a blatant example
of God’s injustice. God makes a bet
with Satan about whether Job, a
wealthy and devout man, will re-
main pious if everything good in
his life is taken away. With God’s
permission, Satan kills Job’s chil-
dren, destroys his wealth and cov-
ers his body with loathsome boils.
This deity isn’t far from the ones
Shakespeare describes in “King
Lear”: “As flies to wanton boys are
we to the gods;/They kill us for
their sport.”
As Job sits in mourning, three of
his friends try to convince him that
what has happened to him is just.
Most of the book consists of the
verse speeches that these “com-
forters” and Job exchange, arguing
for and against the notion that God
always rewards the righteous and
punishes the wicked. Job refuses to
accept this pious cliché; he insists
on telling the truth about a God
who has afflicted him for no good
reason. “I will complain in the bit-
terness of my soul,” Job says in the
familiar King James Version of the
Bible, and he does just that: “[God]
will laugh at the trial of the inno-
cent./The earth is given into the
hand of the wicked: he covereth the
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Only at the end of the book,
when God speaks to Job from out
of a whirlwind, does he admit de-
feat; and even then, he is defeated
not by arguments but by God’s
sheer power. “Hast thou an arm
like God? Or canst thou thunder
with a voice like him?” God de-
mands. Job does not come to
believe that God is just, only that
he can’t be beaten. “Wherefore I
abhor myself, and repent in dust
and ashes,” he says in his last
speech.
Or does he? Mr. Greenstein
argues in the introduction to his
new version that “much of what
has passed as translation of Job is
facile and fudged.” The text of Job
is famously difficult to interpret;
its Hebrew is so unusual that the
12th century Hebrew grammarian
Ibn Ezra theorized that it was
translated from another language.
Mr. Greenstein doesn’t go that
far, but he does suggest that the
Job poet must have known some
Phoenician, Babylonian, Arabic and
Aramaic, and in his notes he draws
on those languages to decipher
obscurities in the Hebrew.
Mr. Greenstein isn’t shy about
challenging earlier interpretations
of the text. Take Job’s final line
about “dust and ashes,” in which
he appears to be apologizing for
daring to challenge God. That’s
what the King James Version
implies, as does Robert Alter in
his 21st-century rendering of
Job 42:6: “Therefore do I recant, /
And I repent in dust and ashes.”Mr. Greenstein, however, offers
a strikingly different reading:
“That is why I am fed up;/I take
pity on ‘dust and ashes!’ ” This Job
does not sound like he is apologiz-
ing or taking anything back: He is
simply tired of arguing with God.
And instead of covering himself
in dust and ashes, like a mourner,
Job uses the words as a figure of
speech for what Mr. Greenstein
calls “the wretched human con-
dition.” In other words, Job sides
until the bitter end with wronged
human beings, not with the God
who wrongs them.
What’s more, Mr. Greenstein
sometimes moves sections of the
book out of their traditional order,
on the grounds that the standard
Biblical text reflects significant
errors in transmission. For instance,
the last half of Chapter Four, an
account of a visitation from a spirit,
is credited in most Bibles to Job’s
friend Eliphaz (one of the “comfort-
ers.”) But Mr. Greenstein argues
that it was accidentally separated
from the end of Job’s previous
speech. While Mr. Greenstein indi-
cates the traditional chapter and
verse divisions in the text, he also
divides the book into sections of
his own making that follow the
sequence of the debate—so that, for
instance, “Eliphaz’s First Discourse”
is followed by “Job’s Response
to Eliphaz.” This division, and Mr.
Greenstein’s headnotes to each
section, help the oftentimes murky
and repetitive speeches to sound
more like an actual discussion.
Other scholars will be able to
fully evaluate the textual reasoningbehind such decisions. The general
reader is primarily interested in
aesthetic values like beauty and
clarity; here Mr. Greenstein often
suffers by comparison with other
English translations. One of the
best-known lines in the King James
Version, for instance, is Job 5:7:
“Yet man is born to trouble, as the
sparks fly upward.” In Mr. Green-
stein’s version, this becomes: “But
a human is born to travail,/As
‘sons of Resheph’ fly up high.”
“Resheph” is a Canaanite god who,
Mr. Greenstein says, is often de-
picted with arrows; but in this case,
the decision in favor of supposed
philological accuracy comes at the
expense of a clear, vivid image.
Meanwhile, “fly up high” sounds
unidiomatic and “travail” archaic.
The most noteworthy of Mr.
Greenstein’s choices is to avoid
using the word “God.” Instead, he
prefers a transliteration of the
Hebrew, such as “Eloah” or “El.”
In these forms, God becomes akin
to Resheph, a strange and ancient
deity that has nothing to do with
the God most people think of as
their own. Mr. Greenstein justifies
this on the ground that these
names connote “power, not good-
ness, the way the English term
‘God’ does.” But whether God is
good or merely powerful is, of
course, the whole question that the
Book of Job wants us to ponder.Mr. Kirsch is an editor in the
Review section at the Journal
and the author, most recently,
of “Who Wants to Be a Jewish
Writer? and Other Essays.”Job: A New Translation
By Edward L. Greenstein
Yale, 206 pages, $26
A Matter of Dust & Ashes
IN THE NIGHT SEASON ‘Job’s Evil Dreams’ (1805-06) by William Blake.
THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM/ART RESOURCE, NYBOOKS
‘O you tireless watcher,/What have I done to you?/That you make everything I dread and everything I fear/Come true?’—JONI MITCHELL, ‘SIRE OF SORROW’
FICTION
SAMSACKSIN TÉA OBREHT’S 2011 block-
buster, “The Tiger’s Wife,” a
tiger, panicked by the Nazis’
bombardment of Belgrade,
escapes from the zoo and makes
its way to the Balkan country-
side, sowing alarm among
villagers save a lonely butcher’s
wife, who tames it with cuts of
meat. A runaway beast again
terrorizes a remote community
in Ms. Obreht’s new novel,
“Inland” (Random House,
374 pages, $27) , but this time
the creature is a camel. If that
sounds somewhat less fantas-
tical, consider that the year is
1893 and Ms. Obreht’s setting
is the American Southwest.
Her heroine is Nora Lark, a
besieged homesteader subsisting
on a “little scald of earth” in a
drought-ridden region of the
Arizona Territory. Nora’s
husband, a newspaper publisher,
has been gone for days, appar-
ently to track down the family’s
water supplier. But there’s
mounting suspicion that his
absence has something to do
with the standoff with a neigh-
boring township for control of
the county seat. Across a single,
parched day, we follow Nora’s
encounters with an array of locals
whose motives shed light on the
political drama and her personal
secrets—though her strangest
interactions are with the out-of-
control camel inexplicably
running riot on her property.Like the escaped tiger, this
camel has its origin in history.
The second story woven into
“Inland” concerns the U.S. Army’s
short-lived Camel Corps of the
1850s, in which camels and their
drivers were shipped to Texas
from the Ottoman Empire for
the purpose of transporting
cargo during the Indian Wars.
Ms. Obreht works with real-life
figures—the most memorable is
a Syrian-Greek convert to Islam
named Hadji Ali, known as
“Hi Jolly” to the Americans—
but her main character is purely
invented: an orphan turned
outlaw whose Balkan ancestry
is preserved only in his name,
Lurie, derived from the surname
Djurić. On the run from a tena-
cious U.S. marshal, Lurie forges a
new identity as a cameleer. (His
narrative is addressed to his be-
loved camel, Burke.) It’s through
his memories that we view
those impossible animals in all
their ungainly, arresting majesty,
as when Hi Jolly, while passing
with the Camel Corps through
Indianola, Texas, demonstrates
their strength by loading one
with over a thousand pounds of
supplies assembled by the locals:At last the storehouses and pan-
tries of Indianola were empty,
and Jolly bade the camel stand.
It unfolded like a dream making
itself up as it went. Falteringly, it
rocked forward and up and back,strutted one set of legs, one set
of leathery thumbprint knees,
and then the other, scaffolding
itself, tilting its rider around as
though he were just another
protrusion of its own damnable
autonomy.In ungulate fashion, “Inland”
too unfolds like a dream. The
supernatural mingles liberally
with the real. Two characters
can communicate with
the dead: An ingénue
cousin of Nora’s
husband speaks to the
“other living” during
séances, and Lurie is
cursed with the ability
to see ghosts, and often becomes
possessed by their yearnings.
A certain matter-of-factness in
presentation helps the reader
accept these storytelling licenses.
From the point of view of the
characters, being waylaid by an
apparition is no more unlikely
than bumping into a dromedary.
Ms. Obreht’s prodigious gifts
at synthesis are also on show
in the novel’s mongrel language,
which joins flashy poeticisms
(Lurie elegizes “the faint sucking
thud of that big heart in the
fathoms forward” of his camel’s
hump) with the sort of formal,
Latinate diction (words such as
“enkindered,” “ensouled” and
“instated”) that typically emerges
from the mouths of literary
characters in the Old West.But despite Ms. Obreht’s
inspired mimicry of the conven-
tions of the Western, one never
senses that “Inland” belongs to
that genre, any more than “The
Tiger’s Wife” was a novel about
war in the Balkans. The true
setting of both books is a smoky
borderland between East and
West, reality and fantasy, the
living and the dead, textbook
history and fairy tales. Ms. Obreht
has the extraordinary
ability to make a seam-
less whole from these
fused parts, creating a
fully immersive imagi-
nary world governed
by its own logic and
oriented around its own truths.
There are few more thankless
tasks than writing a second
novel after a big debut success,
since the book will invariably be
judged in relation to its prede-
cessor and be faulted either for
failing to bottle the same magic
or for too closely repeating
itself. (The so-called sophomore-
novel slump is generally a critic’s
projection rather than an actual
decline in quality.) “Inland” is
a continuation rather than a
departure, so it shares certain
weaknesses with “The Tiger’s
Wife.” The bedtime-story
elements can become twee and
caricatured. In “The Tiger’s
Wife” there was guff about
gypsies; here it’s the mustache-
twirling cattle-baron nemesis ofthe Larks. And the novel feels
sanitized. Historical depreda-
tions, particularly against Native
Americans, are alluded to but
kept carefully out of sight, lest
they spoil the magical effect.
Yet that effect is so beguiling
that when you’re under its spell
the objections seem beside the
point. Ms. Obreht is at her best
chronicling Lurie’s years of
desert wayfaring, wherein every
episode gives rise to a new
legend. Speaking to his camel
about a recent encounter with
a writer who had come west to
find stories, Lurie says: “I told
him about that time a flood
caught us up in a painted canyon
and the waters rose around us
while you walked until, kicking
slowly, you floated up, up past
the petroglyphs and the shining,
swooping walls of the canyon,
and swam on a new river of rain
with me on your back, all the
way down, so far that when the
waters fell your feet touched
down in Mexico.”
The writer jotted down the
tale but was murdered—“two
rounds through his back”—
before he could put it in a book.
Lurie later spots his ghost on the
road, looking puzzled by his fate.
“Inland” is a place of killers,
camels, families and phantoms.
Reading it, you may feel as Lurie
does: “I had somehow wanted
my way into a marvel that had
never before befallen this world.”Ghosts of the OldWest
THIS WEEK
Inland
By Téa ObrehtCHRISTOPHER BROWN looks to
be cornering the market on future
dystopias. His “Tropic of Kansas”
two years ago was set in a
Midwest ruined by drought and
government neglect. Now his
“Rule of Capture” (Harper
Voyager, 378 pages, $15.99) is
set in the same world as the
earlier novel but at the other end of the social
spectrum, in Washington among the lawyers and
the politicians. The threat is still the same: an
overbearing security state, established in response
to the U.S. having lost the satellite war in near-
space amid rising Chinese domination.
One can be sure a “1984” scenario in the U.S.
would still be marked by due process, defendants
put on trial, with court-appointed lawyers and
evidence disclosed according to rule. Mr. Brown’s
hero Donny is just such a lawyer, appointed to
defend Xelina Rocafuerte, a filmmaker who
knows too much about the killing of a prominent
dissident. She’s been hit with terrorism charges,
accused of being a “leading producer of...recruit-
ing videos” for something called the Free Rovers
Organization. Donny soon finds out how the new
system works. The prosecu-
tion’s evidence is disclosed only
as the trial starts, with anything
useful in it “redacted”—a word
no one knew not so long ago—
and the judge has orders from
on high. With surveillance
cameras everywhere, Donny
notes, “this was a courthouse
where justice was not blind, but all-seeing.”
The threat his client is facing is “denaturaliza-
tion,” removal of citizenship and deportation, but
as European states have already found out, there’s
a problem with that. Send returning jihadists back
to country of origin? Can that be identified? Some
states will refuse to accept them. In other cases, the
fear of very much harsher treatment in the target
country means there’s a “human rights” issue.
What to do? In Napoleonic times, the British
used “prison hulks” for French prisoners, and in
Mr. Brown’s future, it’s old tankers conveniently
moored in international waters: Stack them and
forget them.
Nor is this going to sound unreasonable to many
voters. “America, love it or leave it” is the slogan,
and replying, “But we’re not traitors, we’re re-
formers”—it just doesn’t have the same ring.
Donny’s solution is to keep exposing the politics
that makes the law, fighting through precedent
and publicity. So “Rule of Capture” is not just
sci-fi, it’s also a legal thriller. Its author is himself
a lawyer, just like John Grisham, and he has a grip
on detail that full-time sci-fi authors can’t match.A Justice
Not Blind
But All-Seeing
THIS WEEK
Rule of
Capture
By Christopher
BrownSCIENCE FICTION
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