Belief, Desire and Wish in Job 19.23-27:
Clues for the Identity of Job's 'Redeemer'
Published in On the Way to the Postmodern: Old Testament Essays 1967-1998, Volume 2 (JSOTSup, 292; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 762-6923 O that my declarations were written,
that they could be inscribed on a monument,
24 with an iron chisel and with lead
graven into the rock in perpetuity!
25 But I know my gø'l lives
and that he will rise last to speak for me on earth,
26 even after my skin has thus/1/ been stripped from me.
Yet to behold Eloah while still in my þesh-that is my desire,
to see him for myself,
27 to see him with my own eyes, not as a stranger.
My inmost being is consumed with longing!
(Job 19.23-37)The question, Who is Job's gø'l?, has only ever been thought to admit of two possible answers: God, or another heavenly being. In this paper I will argue that it is neither.
The interpretation of these celebrated and much debated verses can be materially assisted by making distinctions between what Job knows or believes, what he desires, and what he wishes. These are distinctions that can be discerned throughout Job's speeches. Of course, it is theoretically possible that here he should make a decisive break with all he has said previously and take a great leap into the unknown, claiming now to know something he has never before claimed or even hinted at. But it is more convincing to read these words in the light of what we have already heard from him and along the lines of his argument hitherto. Coherence within the literary work does not mean that no character can ever develop, that no argument can ever be modiÞed; but we are well justiÞed in seeking Þrst an explanation of our text that coheres with the trend of the texts that surround it.
What Job has known, or believed, hitherto, is that God is his enemy (6.4; 10.8-14; 13.23; 16.7-14; 19.7-12), that he will never again see good (7.7), that he will soon be dead (7.21; 10.20; 16.22), that he will be murdered by God (12.15; 16.18), that although he is innocent of any wrong for which he could be suffering (6.10c, 29; 9.15, 17, 20, 21; 12.4; 13.18) he can have no hope of wresting vindication from God (9.2-3, 20, 28-33; 13.15; 19.7), and that his own innocence-which is known to God even if unacknowledged by him-is the one thing in which he can have conÞdence (13.16; 16.19-21). What he actually says he 'knows', using the verb yåda', is that he is in the right (13.18), that God will not count him innocent (9.28), that God's whole purpose throughout Job's life has been to mark him down as a sinner (10.13), that it is impossible to compel God to vindicate anyone (9.2). Obviously, the fact that Job 'knows' something does not prove it is true. But, right or wrong, these are all fundamental convictions of his-which is perhaps all that 'knowledge' can mean in the Þeld of ethics or religion.
What Job has desired hitherto, on the other hand, is quite different. Initially, his desire had of course been to be put to death immediately (6.8-9) and then in chs. 910 he has voiced his misgiving that any kind of desire on his part would be simply futile. But thereafter the desire that develops within him is to enter into dispute with God (13.3, 22) in the hope of winning vindication before his death. When once that protestation of his innocence stands in the heavenly court as his witness, advocate, spokesman, and pledge, prepared to argue his case before God (16.19-20a, 21; 17.3), Job's part in the dispute has been fulÞlled, and his desire now becomes one that God should in turn play his part by responding to him. The shape of that desire has been expressed in its most strongly emotional form at 16.20: 'sleepless I wait for God's reply'.
And what Job has wished for hitherto have been impossibilities. His previous wishes introduced by 'O that . . . (mî yittn)' have all been futilities, in 6.8-9 that God would kill him as a sign of the aimlessness of his existence: in 13.5 that his friends would keep their peace; in 14.13 that God would hide him in Sheol until his wrath was past, and then revivify him.
So this is what we know of Job prior to this strophe in ch. 19. What Job knows is that he is innocent and God is attacking him, what he wishes is that the whole universe should be different, what he desires is that he should have a personal legal confrontation with God that would establish his innocence.
Here in ch. 19 his desire is exactly the same. It is that he should 'see' God as the respondent in his court-case while he is still alive ('to behold Eloah while still in my þesh-that is my desire', 19.26). And the next time also that he will speak of his desire, it will be in the same terms: in 23.3-7 he will wish that he knew where he could Þnd God, that he could reach his judgment seat and lay his case before him so as to receive the vindication he deserves. The desire remains constant.
Here too, what he knows or believes is also of a piece with what he has said before and will say again, though what he says here does make an advance. Hitherto he had never expressed any conviction that he would in the end be vindicated. Of course, his unquenchable desire for vindication and his conÞdence in the ineluctable rightness of his cause have been unmistakable, but he has never yet said straight out that he 'knows' that he will in the end actually be vindicated. Once he has decided to argue his case with God (13.3), he afÞrms, 'I know that I am in the right' (13.18), and 'This is what I take refuge in: a godless man does not approach him' (13.16). And he believes that his declaration of innocence will go on arguing his case before God as a man argues for his friend (16.21). But he never has said that he believes he will in the end be successful in his lawsuit; that is the advance here. And that is what he still believes in ch. 23 also: 'When he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold' (23.10). It is important to see that Job has no beliefs about any future act of salvation or mercy on God's part, only about an inevitable and ultimate recognition of his blamelessness. The person (if person it is) who will declare him innocent is of less signiÞcance than the fact of his innocence which alone will make that declaration possible.
And what Job wishes now is no less a forlorn hope than those previous utterances introduced by 'O that'. There is no likelihood that anyone is going to inscribe his protestation of innocence on a rock face (19.24), but nevertheless he utters the wish. He needs his innocence to be inscribed in some permanent medium that will last beyond his death; for he has no real hope of vindication before his death, however much he desires it. To be sure, he believes that his protestation stands written into the heavenly record, but heavenly accounting is an enigmatic business, and he would feel more secure that his case will some day be decided if he knew that his words were preserved imperishably on earth. He does not, frankly, expect that he will be vindicated before his death, so despite his conviction that he will 'in the end' be adjudged innocent (v. 25) he voices the wish that the record of his case should be committed to permanent writing (vv. 23-24). Such enduring written words would then serve a similar function to the earth's refusal to cover up his murder in 16.18; earth and inscription would alike keep his cause alive.
Now, given that such are Job's belief, desire and wish, who (or, what) can be Job's 'champion' (gø'l), who 'lives' and whose assistance will establish Job's innocence in the end? It can hardly be God, as Ringgren puts it succinctly: 'Since the lawsuit here stands in the context of a dispute with God, it seems unlikely that God himself would appear as vindicator and legal attorney against himself'./2/ Nor is it a heavenly being. Eliphaz has warned Job in ch. 5 that none of the holy ones would hear him if he called (5.1), and Job has not demurred, but has simply bewailed the absence of any mediator between himself and God (9.33). What I propose is that we should recognize that the similarities between this passage and 16.18-21 must make those verses fundamental to the interpretation of ch. 19:18 O earth, cover not my blood,
and let my outcry Þnd no rest.
19 Even now my witness is in heaven,
my advocate is on high.
20 It is my cry/3/ that is my spokesman;/4/
sleepless/5/ I wait for God's reply.
21 That cry will argue a mortal's case before God
as a man argues for his friend.
It ought to be unmistakable that the gø'l of ch. 19 is the same as the 'witness' ('d), the 'advocate' (øhd) and the 'spokesman' (målªß) of ch. 16. In that place it is Job's 'cry' (ra') that is explicitly said to be his 'spokesman' and so also by implication his 'witness' and 'advocate'. That means to say, there is no personal being in heaven to represent Job; only his cry, uttered in the direction of God, speaks on his behalf. If in ch. 16 his 'cry' is personiÞed as his witness, advocate and spokesman, it is perfectly intelligible, though it remains a bold metaphor, that it should here be called his 'kinsman' or 'champion'. So the afÞrmation here, 'My champion lives', is nothing different from the asseveration of 16.19: 'Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven'.
The question may well be asked, But why should Job here call his deposition of character (which is the content of his 'cry') his gø'l , when in ch. 16 he had used more exclusively legal terms, 'spokesman', 'witness', 'advocate'? The reason is the present context. It is here in ch. 19 that Job has most extensively elaborated his desertion by his relatives and acquaintances (vv. 13-19). Not one of them wants anything to do with him, and he is bereft of any personal gø'l who might defend his cause. God is his enemy, so he has no one to rely on except himself. He has to be his own gø'l just as in 17.3 he had to be his own surety:Keep my pledge/6/ close by you, [O God,]
for there is no one who will stand surety for me.But why, next, we might ask, should Job use such personal language in saying that his cry 'lives' (ay)? We may note that the adjective and the verb 'to live' (åyâ) are not used in the Old Testament exclusively of animate beings, though of course that is the most normal sense. Water is often called 'living' (Gen. 26.19; Lev. 14.5, 6, 51, 52; 15.3; Num. 19.17; Cant. 4.15; Jer. 2.13; 17.13; Zech. 14.8), so is 'raw' meat (1 Sam. 2.15); God's 'work' can be 'made to live' (Hab. 3.2), as can the stones of a city (Neh. 3.34 [Eng. 4.2]) or a city generally (1 Chron. 11.8) or grain (Hos. 14.8 [Eng. 7]). But these references are not wholly relevant, for what we are dealing with here is not a special denotation of the verb 'lives'. 'Lives' becomes an appropriate term once Job's cry is personiÞed as a living being, a kinsman-champion: obviously a 'living' kinsman is one who will take up his cause effectively. But an even more compelling reason for the presence of the term 'lives' is Job's conviction that he himself will soon be dead (cf. v. 10) and that to have any chance of being vindicated he needs some testimony to himself to survive his death. Only after '[his] skin has thus been stripped from [him]' (v. 26a), that is, after his death, can there be vindication for him, for, to be realistic, there seems little chance of it this side of a death that looms imminently.
But now, in the sharpest contrast to Job's expectation of a post-mortem vindication is his desire: What he wants is to see his name cleared while he is still alive. 'From my þesh' (mbry) is by anyone's reckoning a rather strange way of saying 'while I am still alive'; but the only alternative meaning, 'without my þesh' (rsv mg, etc.), that is, after my death, not only contradicts Job's frequently expressed desire but raises the problem of how Job can 'see' if he has no body. The 'imperfect' verb 'zh, conventionally translated 'I shall see', should be taken either as a modal imperfect (GKC, §107m-n) or as a cohortative (GKC, §48b-e), expressing a will or desire rather than a simple prediction (thus also njps: 'But I would behold God while still in my þesh'; Tur-Sinai: 'I want to see [my] God'; Habel: 'I would behold Eloah'; Fohrer: 'I would see God').
It is true that Job has nowhere previously said he wants to 'see' God in so many words, but such a desire is plainly implied by his previously expressed ambition to come to trial with God (9.32), by his regret that there is no arbitrator who could lay his hands on both Job and God (9.33),/7/ his wish to speak to the Almighty (13.3), and especially his ambition to defend his behaviour 'to [God's] face' (13.15), his promise not to 'hide [himself] from [God's] face' (13.20), and his complaint that God 'hides [his] face' (13.24). This sounds quite like seeing, as if seeing God has been an important part of his desire. Now that he has come out with the unambiguous word 'see' (zh), he can say it again more openly and expansively in ch. 23 where he wishes he could Þnd the way to God's 'seat' (23.3) and bewails the fact that he cannot perceive (byn), see (zh) or behold (r'h) God. Such an encounter, however difÞcult or hazardous, is his desire. The metaphor of the lawsuit is entirely sufÞcient to account for this language of 'seeing' God (it is not a question of a theophany, as Fohrer).
The next line says in the most emphatic manner that it is with God that he desires to treat (we note the emphatic ly, 'for myself', as well as the emphases in 'my eyes', and 'no stranger'). Even if the 'kinsman-champion' were a personal thing, and not, as argued here, simply a personiÞcation of Job's plea, such a being fades immediately into the background. The champion has no signiÞcance in himself, but functions only to keep Job's cause alive before God. It has to be God's vindication if it is to be vindication at all. And of course if Job himself, and not someone else ('a stranger'), is to witness God vindicating him, Job himself has to be alive.
The last line of the strophe (v. 27c) somewhat enigmatically conveys the emotion with which this desire has been expressed. Andersen's despairing translation, 'my kidneys have ended in my chest', shows the extent of the difÞculty. But if we allow that the kidneys, as a most sensitive part of the anatomy (cf. 16.13) and as the seat of the emotions and affections, stand for the feelings in general (Ps. 73.21; Prov 23.16); that 'come to an end' (klh) means particularly to be exhausted by longing (as of the np¡, 'soul, vitality' in Ps. 84.3 [2]; 119.81); and that 'in my chest, bosom' (q) means simply 'within me' (which is more commonly bqrby, Jer. 23.9; 1 Sam. 25.37)-then Job means that he is emotionally exhausted, psychically drained, by the intensity of his feelings (cf. nab 'my inmost being is consumed with longing').Conclusion
What Job desires is to see God vindicating him before he dies. What he knows (that is, has the Þrmest conviction about) is that he will be vindicated ultimately but not before he dies, and not because God is just but because his cause is just. What he wishes is that his protestation of innocence could be preserved permanently on earth, since heaven is an unreliable quarter from which to seek vindication.
On the understanding here presented, the centre of gravity in the strophe before us (vv. 23-27) is therefore not the hopeless wish of vv. 23-24, nor yet the unshaken conviction that he will eventually Þnd vindication even though it may be after his death, but the reiterated desire than 'from [his] þesh', that is, while he is still alive, he should come face to face with God, the two of them parties in a legal contest that will issue in Job's full vindication.
It needs Þnally to be said that the foregoing exegesis has proceeded on the basis of 'the story so far', and has presented a reading 'as if for the Þrst time', a reader-response orientation. A second reading, in which the end of the book is allowed to resonate here also, superimposes a new level of meaning above the meaning intended in these lines by the character Job. It is an irony, though not at all a bitter irony, that Job's words have a meaning other than he envisages. The truth is that, though he expects God to be the last person who would vindicate him, God does indeed in the end become his vindicator, and that on earth (42.10, 12). Job's desire to 'see' God is fulÞlled to the letter (42.5), and the belief and the desire of these verses, here so antithetical to one another, are shown in the end to be identical. In the end, Job does not see his hope fulÞlled, for he has no real hope; but he sees his words, hopeless but desirous, fulÞlled with unimaginable precision.
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