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The Lord said unto Satan:
“Job still holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.”
Job 2:3

What are we to make of the Book of Job?  The opening and closing chapters present us with a patient sufferer, who accepts all the misfortunes inflicted upon him, who rejects his own wife’s advice to “curse God, and die” (2:9), and who is finally rewarded for his constancy with greater prosperity than he had enjoyed at the beginning (42:12). 
            But the intervening chapters give quite a different picture.  Job had considered God to be his friend, and when he now finds himself treated as an enemy, he rails at his divine persecutor with such vehemence that some rabbis thought the book too blasphemous to be included in sacred scripture. 
            So which Job is the real Job, and which God is the real God?  The God that loves every creature He has made, or the sadistic bully who drives his faithful servant to despair?
            At the end of the book the Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind (38:1).  This uncanny encounter is what Rudolf Otto has a called “a numinous experience,”   one that includes the three elements of mystery, terror, and fascination.  When it’s all over, Job confesses, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.  Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:5-6).  Was this a mystical experience, or simply a prudent capitulation to superior might? 
            What is troubling about God’s behavior is its irrationality.  Surely, in His omniscience, God ought to have known that Job’s faithful service was motivated by love and not by self-interest.  Why, then, was He seduced by Satan’s diabolical insinuation, “Doth Job fear God for nought” (1:9)
            To be sure, Old Testament literature is filled with dark images of God which are irreconcilable with the idea of the deity as the embodiment of perfect goodness.  But where Otto sees in Job’s experience in the whirlwind a reconciliation which led our hero to spiritual satisfaction and peace, the psychologist C.G. Jung was enraged by the Lord’s failure to recognize Job’s transparent righteousness, and he concludes from this monstrous behavior that God simply doesn’t know what He is doing.  Christ’s words from the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), must be applied to God Himself!
            Indeed, in Jung’s mythic elaboration of the story, God’s encounter with Job provokes a change in the deity itself.  Counseled by his consort Sophia, God decides to become man, and thus to experience on the cross the unjust suffering which he had meted out to Job.  The answer to Job is the crucifixion. 
            The fact that two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century could come to such different interpretations of this tale shows that reading scripture is itself a numinous experience—mysterious, terrifying, and yet fascinating.             

September 30, 2007

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