Those Golden Days:
Job and the Perils of NostalgiaPublished in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 2 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 792-800Last month, the biography of Robert Runcie, former archbishop of Canterbury, appeared./1/ In the newspapers, he confessed that it had been his devoutest wish to have died before the book came out. It was not that there was any scandal, not that there was any particular untruth in the biography for which he had spent hours in tape-recorded conversation with his biographer. It was just that he was a victim of the perils of nostalgia. By telling it more or less as it was, he realized in retrospect that he had said more than he really wanted us to know.
It is much the same with Job. Throughout the book, he has been for most readers an immensely sympathetic character. We believe that he has been wronged by God and that he is being grossly misunderstood by the friends; and we admire his dignity, his passion, and his refusal to be humiliated by his afþictions. But can we sustain that positive reading of Job's character once we get to his last speech in chs. 2931? Is it perhaps that in these nostalgic reminiscences he tells us more about himself than he really knows, more indeed than we ourselves would really like to know?
Here are eight elements in Job's Þnal speech in which nostalgia proves a risky business for the perfect man Job.
1. Economics
Nostalgia is a charming thing. It is charming how Job depicts his former existence, his 'winter days' when he was still sowing for his future, those golden days that ended dramatically only the other week with a bolt from heaven and an unforeseen razzia. How charming too is the naive interweaving of the literal and the metaphorical, the simplicity of an image like 'my lads about me' giving place to the exotic extravagance of a phrase like 'my feet bathed with curds'.
Oh, that I were as in the months of old
when the Almighty was yet with me,
when my children were about me;
when my steps were washed with milk,
and the rock poured out for me streams of oil! (29.2, 5-6)Or is there perhaps something other than charm and naivety in that superþuity of food, with cream (or rather, yoghurt) enough to wash his feet in, and oil þowing in 'streams' or 'rivers' (glp) from his olive presses? Some Þnd here an innocent rejoicing in the abundance of nature, and will not cavil. But Job is not speaking here about natural superabundance; his yoghurt and his olive oil are the products of agribusiness, and he cares nothing for the waste of human labour and natural resources that goes into the production of such surpluses. Nor does he recognize the economic connection between agricultural overproduction and the poverty of the farm labourers he had so graphically and sympathetically (if also exaggeratedly) depicted in 24.10-11. Excessive wealth is to him a sign of God's blessing; to the poor who starve as they carry the sheaves it is a sign of God's curse upon themselves.
2. Honour
Another thing: all through the book, we have felt for Job in his dishonour; but now it comes to the point where we glimpse the shape of the honour he once had, we are not so sure. Each day, Job would go out to the gate of the city and take up his regular seat in the town square. The other elders would rise to their feet as he approached and remain standing, presumably until he had taken his seat. Lev. 19.32 prescribed the gesture of standing up in the presence of an old man; though Job is not old, he is powerful, and he accepts (or should we say, requires) the deference due to the aged. Once Job had arrived, there would be a deathly hush; then Job would speak his mind, the assembly would listen until he had Þnished--and even then they would not utter a word, as if he had delivered a divine oracle. After he had spoken they did not speak again (29.22)! This is a truly incredible picture, but it is what Job wants to remember. He seriously cannot remember anyone else having anything to say, and he can only recall everyone being immensely impressed with his wisdom and deeply grateful for it. He was never challenged, never put in the wrong, and equally, never supported, never instructed, never stimulated. No town council in the world ever worked like that--not unless there was a dictator in their midst, not unless there was a hidden violence and an unexpressed fear. It is not a pretty picture, this picture of Job's honour, and perhaps it tells us more about Job than we would really like to know.
Honour has been a key ingredient in Job's former life. It was not the exercise of naked power that gave him the quality of life he desired, it was not the satisfaction of bringing help to the needy, it was not his consciousness of the divine presence. They were all factors; but what he really enjoyed, and what he so desperately lacks now, is honour. Honour is an acknowledgment of worth by one's society; though it may be always open to contestation, to gain it and to keep it is in traditional societies the primary goal of an adult male./2/ What Job craves, and what he once enjoyed, was honour perpetually 'fresh' (vdj, 'new'), new signals of approval and recognition by his peers.Then I thought, I shall die in my nest,
and I shall multiply my days as the sand,
my glory fresh with me,
and my bow ever new in my hand (29.18, 20).There is a darker side to this honour, though. Not many would begrudge Job, or anyone, all the honour they can get, if honour means merely praise for adhering to socially approved values. But there is a cost in acquiring and keeping honour. Along with fresh honour goes an ever-pliant 'bow' (tvq, v. 17), for in the quest for honour there are winners and losers; just as on the battleÞeld those who retire with 'honour' are the victors and those with 'shame' the vanquished, so in the social jockeying for position those who are not honoured but shamed, who are indeed the vanquished, even if the force of arms against them is entirely metaphorical. Job's 'bow' is not a mere symbol of 'manliness' (Delitzsch) or 'manly vigor' (e.g. Hartley) or 'strength and resilience' (Alden) or sexual vigour (Fedrizzi, Good) and the like; bows are used only for inþicting injury and death on other people. There is nothing innocent about this image, which symbolizes not just Job's internal strength but his power over the life of others.
3. Power
Here is a case where Job was bringing that power into play:
I broke the fangs of the unrighteous,
and made him drop his prey from his teeth (29.17).Job evidently had no misgiving about the use of violence in the interests of justice. Indeed, his assaults on perpetrators of injustice (I mean, those he regarded as perpetrators of injustice) form a climax in his catalogue of memories of the past. And what we learn from that is that Job's acts of benevolence have been the velvet glove over an iron Þst. Those fanged animalistic opponents of Job, whose jawbones he shatters, were of course, in reality, nothing other than fellow-citizens of his, with whom he would debate and do business at the town gate. But his language makes them into almost demonic, and certainly sub-human, Þgures. No way to treat people, not even bad people.
4. Age
Old men have a right to nostalgia about the past. But not to say that young men who criticize them are despicable.
Job's complaint is:But now they make sport of me,
men who are younger than I,
whose fathers I would have disdained
to set with the dogs of my þock (30.1).It is especially galling to Job that among his detractors are men 'younger' than him, literally, 'smaller in days'. For him, younger men are less signiÞcant, less entitled to form judgments; we recall the younger men at the town gate who would hide themselves when Job approached (29.8), knowing that Job had no esteem for them, or Elihu, that 'pert braggart boy', as Herder called him. In a patriarchal society it is not only women who are oppressed, but younger men also; nostalgic Job is a spokesman for inverse ageism, which will not listen to ideas on their merits but makes the age of their propounder the principal thing.
5. Class
Nostalgic Job shows himself a insensitive patrician in his response to these youthful detractors of his. If the sons mock Job, he reasons, their fathers must be from the lower classes. Job would have 'despised' them as candidates for the duties of sheep-dogs (30.1); it is vicious language. His unlovely mechanism for handling the dishonour he is suffering is to assign even greater dishonour to his opponents; he presumes that they come from disreputable backgrounds, and moreover, that extreme poverty is itself a dishonour. And like his ageism, his classism is catching too.
Rowley, for example, writes of the impoverished people imagined by Job as the sires of his critics as 'degenerate weaklings, unÞt for honest toil'. Hartley speaks of them as 'the dregs of society', 'displaced desert rabble', 'repulsive outcasts'. Andersen comments: 'Less than human, this gang is rightly expelled from where decent people live'. Alden calls them 'the scum of society', 'malicious hoodlums', 'worthless gangsters', and 'undesirable criminal[s] banished from the community', 'coarse, wild animals, motivated by instinct and totally bereft of decency'. Nostalgia has its perils, then, not only for the nostalgic themselves, but also for their sympathizers.
6. Gender
Job is no politically new man, never claimed to be. If he has laid an injunction upon his eyes not to look upon a woman (31.1), it is not because he has anything against the male gaze. He does not mean that he compelled himself to avert his eyes when he passed young women in the street. In Job's culture there is nothing wrong with men, even married men, looking with pleasure, delight, longing or even lust upon young women. How is a man of Job's social standing ever going to acquire a second wife or concubines otherwise? It is just that Job keeps himself so far from any misconduct on this score, he says, that he simply proscribes his desire. The example is deliberately trivial; he means to make an a fortiori argument. If he so rigorously repressed a normal, healthy, and quite acceptable male impulse, which could however just possibly lead to sin, how much more will he have been careful to avoid any deliberate act of real wrongdoing?
Where Job falls down, even by the standards of a pre-feminist age, is not in his self-confessed proclivity to stare at women's bodies, but in his bland assumption that a wife should be sentenced to a life of prostitution for the sexual misdemeanours of her husband.If my heart has been enticed to a woman,
and I have lain in wait at my neighbour's door;
then let my wife grind for another,
and let others bow down upon her (31.9-10).The wife is an object. Job's self-curse for robbing another man of his property is to hand over his own property to other men. It is a savage fate he envisages for his wife: it is not that she is to become the wife or even the concubine (secondary wife) of another, but that she is to be a prostitute--with other men, in the plural, bending ([rk) over her (the term is as explicit and coarse in Hebrew as it in English). Commentators are united in shutting their eyes to this inescapable meaning of the plural verb (Job is assuredly not contemplating a string of serial marriages for her)./3/ The Job we have been cheering from the sidelines in his protest against heaven's injustice is a man, we had better recognize, who would sentence a woman to prostitution for her husband's act of adultery.
7. Slavery
Says Job,
If I have rejected the cause of my manservant or my maidservant,
when they brought a complaint against me;
what then shall I do when God rises up?
When he makes inquiry, what shall I answer him? (34.13-14).Who is Job kidding? Do his slaves have rights against him? Does he imagine that they could take him to court, that is, to the assembly in the town square over which he presides? Given his authoritarian manner in the public assembly in the city square (29.7-10, 21-22), of which we have heard from his own lips, can we believe that his domestic or agricultural slaves would have had the nerve to bring a grievance against him? Yet that is how it seems to Job, for he cannot know how many injustices his slaves have suffered in silence--like, for example, the inexcusable injustice of being a slave in the Þrst place. Commentators, who have never been slaves themselves and have not allowed themselves the experience of reading against the grain or with the hermeneutic of suspicion, miss this fundamental point altogether and are rapt in their praise for Job as an enlightened humanitarian.
8. Self-Deception
It is troubling to think of Job as self-deceiving; for he is the very model of a modern intellectual, autonomous Enlightenment man embroiled with an irrational universe.
But when he asserts,If I have made gold my trust,
or called Þne gold my conÞdence . . .
this also would be an iniquity
to be punished by the judges (31.24, 28)we Þnd ourselves asking: how self-deceiving is he here? Does Job really believe that wealth is so unreliable? He will not have had much beneÞt out of his wealth if he has not realized that he can rely on his gold for many things: to provide him with a square meal and a roof over his head, to maintain his domestic establishment, to fund the parties of his children, to support his social esteem in the town council. A rich man's wealth is his strong city, as Prov. 18.11 has it. And there is no point in riposting that wealth can disappear overnight; for if all one's conÞdence is in God, he too can turn bitter overnight, as Job has found to his cost.
In denying that he has called Þne gold his conÞdence, Job unwittingly contemplates a personal relationship with wealth, the possibility that he could have addressed his money as a sentient being. Is he not indeed half in love with his wealth, and is trusting in it not a real temptation to him?
A second self-deception: while he knows that reverence to sun and moon is an illegitimate form of worship, his depiction of the heavenly bodies shows that he does not take a purely functional attitude to them (as Gen. 1.14-18 does, for example, calling them reductively the big light and the little light). For Job they are already objects of delight, for he fastens on the way the sun þashes forth light, and how the moon moves in splendour. In his heart he already feels regard and affection for the sun and moon; need he go further for his heart to be enticed (htp, 31.9), or is he not enticed already? If he may not waft a kiss (nab) to them, as one might to a lover or a child, without denying God his rights, he has already divinized them, has he not?
There is a repression already in progress here. He recognizes his urge to worship, but he stamps on it, calling the sun simply the 'light',/4/ and putting a fence about his lips. He has already recognized that he could lay himself open to punishment by the judges. His mind runs rapidly on, from a secret thought to a modest gesture to a public prosecution to an open apostasy to a capital punishment. He is not guilty, but he knows from the inside what guilt in this matter would feel like; yet he does not know that he knows, for he deceives himself.
8. In Conclusion
As it began, Job's speech was wrapped in nostalgia, in a conjuring up of blissful days when the protection of God was over his 'tent' (29.4), his sentimental retro-language for his solid urban mansion. But his nostalgia has a peril for his partisans. In his previous speeches we have seen him in the midst of his grief and the Þgure he has cut has been hugely sympathetic as he has tried to wrest justice from a distant and unresponsive God. But now in these chapters we glimpse the Job of the golden days, and turn the pages in the ideological photo album of a man 'blameless and upright'.
By our standards, though he is not a bad man, he stands condemned out of his own mouth on one count after another. Is this is a perfect man? We see him in the town council, acting the authoritarian patriarch (29.7-10, 21-25). We hear him despise his youthful opponents (30.2-8), we hear his rhetoric of assault (30.1, 9-13) with new ears, wondering if he is truly capable of distinguishing criticism and evaluation by others from unprincipled character assassination, and we tremble at his catalogue of oaths with a growing suspicion that he may be the victim of his own self-deceptions. This is a man so concerned for his honour that he can wish for the disgrace of his wife (31.9-10), a man who has convinced himself that his slaves are treated fairly , while discounting the fact that they remain slaves (31.13-15), a man who congratulates himself on his support of the underprivileged (31.16-22) while never questioning the system, and his complicity in it, that makes and keeps them underprivileged, a man who denies the worship of the heavenly bodies but lets slip his attraction to it nevertheless (31.26-28).
Different readers will react differently to these observations. Some will insist that Job be judged only by his own standards and the standards of his time, and will be deeply impressed by his emphasis on the importance of motivation in ethics, an emphasis that seems to go deeper than conventional morality of his own time or ours. Others will feel that they have no other standards to judge by except those to which they themselves are committed, and will regretfully decide that the Job whose part they have been taking throughout the dialogues, though still a remarkable and attractive personality, is a þawed character. And more, that the narrator who certiÞed Job in his opening words as integrious and þawless must himself be an unreliable narrator.
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