28 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by OLIVER MUNDAY

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THE OMNIVORE

Sorry,

Not Sorry

In a new translation of the

Book of Job, the famously

repentant hero gives God a

piece of his mind.

BY JAMES PARKER

CULTURE

FILE

THE

BOOKS, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT

S

O G O D S AY S to Satan, “You

there, what have you been up to?”

And Satan says, “Oh, you know,

just hanging around, minding

my own business.” And God

says, “Well, take a look at my

man Job over there. He worships

me. He does exactly what I tell him. He thinks I’m

the greatest.” “Job?” says Satan. “The rich, happy,

healthy guy? The guy with 3,000 camels? Of

course he does. You’ve given him everything. Take it all away from him, and I

bet you he’ll curse you to your face.” And God says, “You’re on.”

That—give or take a couple of verses—is how it starts, the Book of Job. What

a setup. The Trumplike deity; the shrewd and loitering adversary; the cruelly

flippant wager; and the stooge, the cosmic straight man, Job, upon whose

oblivious head the sky is about to fall. A classic Old Testament skit, pungent

as a piece of absurdist theater or a story by Kafka. Job is going to be immiser-

ated, sealed into sorrow—for a bet. What is life? It’s a bleeping and blooping

Manichaean casino: You’re up or you’re down, in God’s hands or the devil’s.

Piped-in oxygen, controlled light, keep the drinks coming. We, the readers and

inheritors of his book, know this. Job, poor bastard, doesn’t.

After his herds have been finished off by marauders and gushes of heavenly

fire, and his children have been flattened by falling masonry, and he himself

has been covered in running sores from head to toe—after all this happens to

the blameless man, he cracks. He sits on an ash heap, seeping and scratching,

and reviles the day he was born. “Let that day be darkness,” as the King James

Version has it. “Let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine

upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon

it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.”

Howls of despair are a biblical staple, but Job’s self-curse—the special

physics of it, the suicidal pulse that he sends backwards, like a black rainbow,