30 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTICTHE OMNIVOREHere for us
in 2019,
right on time,
is a middle-
finger Job.toward the hour of his own conception—is singular.
Dispossessed of everything, he is choosing nothing.
That first prickle of my existence, the point of light
with my name on it? Turn around, All- Fathering
One, and eclipse it. Delete.
Edward L. Greenstein’s new translation of the
Book of Job is a work of erudition with—as we shall
see—a revolutionary twist. A professor emeritus of
Bible studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, Green-
stein is not going for the deep-time sonorities of
the Authorized Version. His language is lumpy
with scholarly fidelity to the text. But the shock
of repudiation is undiminished. “Why couldn’t I
die after leaving the womb—Just go out the loins
and stop breathing?” his Job demands. “For what
did knees have to receive me? For what were the
breasts that I sucked?” And later: “Why have you
made me your target?” This is where we moderns,
we dopes marooned in the universe, love Job and
find brotherhood with him. Because he’s been in
us since the beginning, since the first germ of our
separateness from everything else—a man con-
fronting the mystery, as if there was a strand of
our DNA in the shape of a question mark: Why?
Now some friends of Job appear and offer, one
after another, the conventional pieties: God is great,
Job must have done something wrong, how dare he
question the ways of the Lord, etc. They’re hard to
take, these friends—Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar,
droning away. Job rejects their arguments, and it’s
here, as the debate goes windily back and forth,
that a 21st-century reader reaches for his phone.
The stark, existential lines of the drama have got-
ten spoiled; the Kafka-voltage has dropped.
But then: enter God. “Up speaks YHWH,” as
Greenstein puts it, momentarily folksy—a voice
“from the windstorm.” “Bind up your loins like
a man,” God warns Job, before stamping on the
effects pedal and delivering perhaps the most shat-
tering speech ever recorded. Question after ques-
tion, power chord after power chord: “Where were
you when I laid earth’s foundations? ... Can you tie
the bands of the Pleiades, Or loosen the cords of
Orion? ... Do you give the horse its bravery?” No
explanation; no answer for Job; no moral or theo-
retical content whatsoever. It’s the interrogation
of consciousness by pure Being, by the Logos, by
the unstopping, unmediated act of creation itself.
Do not try this at home. “Does the falcon take
flight through your wisdom, As it spreads its wings
toward the south?” The human intellect shrinks
before the onslaught. The language is incompara-
ble. God, it turns out, is the greatest poet; no one
can touch him.
And it’s at this point, with Job reduced to a
pair of smoking sandals and the divine mega-
monologue still ringing in the vaults of the firma-
ment, that Greenstein and centuries of tradition
diverge. He has produced his new translation
of Job, he tells us in the introduction, to “set the
record straight.” Every version of the Bible that
you have read puts Job, in the wake of God’s
speech, in an attitude of awestruck contrition or
reconversion. “Wherefore I abhor myself, and
repent in dust and ashes,” he says in the King
James. “I’m sorry—forgive me,” he says in Eugene
H. Peterson’s million-selling plain- language adap-
tation, The Message. “I’ll never do that again, I
promise!” Greenstein’s Job, however, stays vine-
gary to the end. “I have heard you,” he tells God,
“and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am
fed up.” The Hebrew phrase commonly rendered
as some form of I repent, Greenstein translates
as I take pity on. Dust and ashes, meanwhile, is for
Greenstein a biblical epithet meaning humanity in
general. So the line becomes “I take pity on ‘dust
and ashes.’ ” Job’s last word: What a world you’ve
made, God. I feel sorry for everyone.
What does it mean? This newly revealed Job,
writes Greenstein, “is expressing defiance, not capit-
ulation ... If God is all about power and not morality
and justice, Job will not condone it through accep-
tance.” Upon the scholarly merits of this approach,
I am unable to pronounce; as an idea, I’ll consider
it. We don’t read the Bible, it’s been said; the Bible
reads us. It searches us. And here for us in 2019,
right on time, with tyranny back in style and riding
its behemoth through the streets, is a middle-finger
Job, a Job unreconciled to the despotism of experi-
ence. He’s been shattered by life-shocks; then God,
like a wall of terrible noise, fills and overfills his
mind. His response: Thank you, but no.
Gloria Dei est vivens homo, wrote Saint Ire-
naeus: The glory of God is a living man. Might not
the Author of Life look with favor upon this bril-
liantly resis tant creature, this unappeasable critical
thinker, this supremely lonely and dissenting fig-
ure, this Bartleby with boils—unswayed by the sub-
lime, scratching his scabs in the land of Uz? That
might be the rankest heresy: Let me know, bish-
ops. But consider what Greenstein’s nonpenitent,
polarity- reversed Job has done to the ending of the
book. As before, with the experiment over, Job is
blandly restored to a state of health and wealth; as
before, God upbraids the sententious friends, the
Bildads and the Eliphazes and the Zophars, and
sends them off to make some burnt offerings, “for
you did not speak about me in honesty as did my
servant Job.” The quality or valence of this honesty,
however, has turned upside down. It has become
a kind of white-knuckle existential tenacity, a
refusal to disown oneself even in the teeth of the
windstorm. Maybe that’s what this God, faced with
this Job, is telling us: Bring it all before him, the full
grievance of your humanity. Bring him your condi-
tion, loudly. Let him have it.James Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic.JOB: A NEW
TRANSLATION
EDWARD L.
GREENSTEIN
Yale University Press