Job’s Lament
by Prem Kumar Vijayan
It has recently come to light that there actually did live a man called Job, in the old days of the Assyrian gods. This apparently historical figure surfaced in a series of manuscripts that were discovered in the attic of an ancient Jewish trading family, in an old town that struggles to survive in the bustling backwaters of Kochi, in the lush southern state of Kerala, in India.
The owners of the manuscript — one of the last remnants of the Jewish families still in India — have requested anonymity because of the controversial nature of the manuscripts. They appear to have also sought to distance themselves from it by suggesting that they could have come from a Turkish traveller at some time in the 8th century. In any case, the family in question is unable to trace the family’s possession of the manuscripts back by much more than a century.
There is thus some speculation about authenticity. Taking the text at face value, it apparently reveals that Job was himself fundamentally responsible for what happened to him, for the story purports to be not questionable accounts by some third person but apparently the record that the man himself maintained of his own life; that is, Job's own journal, or a transcript thereof.
Since parts of the manuscript are thoroughly mixed with pages from other records and accounts, the process of sorting it out and piecing it together, as well as deciphering the script and then the text, is not only still ongoing but is more than likely to be a long haul. Textual archeology will no doubt raise more questions than it will answer and promises to be a veritable cornucopia of bitter exegetical contestations, as well as of unexpected insights.
Nevertheless, from what has already emerged, it seems clear that Job, as a historical figure, had indulged in gambling schemes that sank him deeper and deeper into debt before he eventually wasted away and died of what appears to have been cancer of the mouth and throat. This alone should be sufficient to indicate that the traditional happy ending to Job's tale is all too suspect.
What is even more extraordinary though, is evidence of a running feud between Job and his God, rather than the relation of absolute faith that the Good Book narrates, for parts of these manuscripts seem to be addressed to some anonymous third party. Scholarly speculation and expert analyses are both increasingly tending towards the conjecture that this third person is likely to be God.
But where the traditional accounts tell of Job's ranting and raving against his fate but never against his God, these manuscripts record quite astoundingly how Job extended his gambling even to his relation to his God. The terms of this wager have not yet been fully deciphered or even fully pieced together, but the fact of the wager is itself proven by the curious repetition of what appears to be the following line, with some variations, at different points of the manuscripts:
“What can you do to me that I cannot already do to myself, o God on high?”
“I'll wager my life you cannot do more than this to me.”
“Who would win the wager if I die: you or I?” etc.
This astounding line and its variations is replete with implications that bode ill for the Old Testament account of Job's life and of his relation to God. At this point, as the meanings of these manuscripts are still emerging, there is little more that can be stated with absolute certainty; however, it is worth engaging in some initial speculation — provided one does so with abundant caution — as to what these lines could mean.
For instance, the repetition of this remarkable wager — “What can you do to me that I cannot already do to myself?” — in these manuscripts, is absent in the Old Testament. Instead, there we have an account of a wager between Satan and God, of which nothing is to be found — so far at least — in these manuscripts. Could the Old Testament wager then be understood as a mutation of the actual one: a cover-up for the amazing dare, “What can you do to me that I cannot already do to myself?”
And it certainly throws new light on the nature of the faith that Job displays: where the old man of the Old Testament lays his faith in the eventual and absolute benevolence of God and even more on his own primary and absolute innocence, the Job of the manuscripts seems uninterested in the primrose paths of innocence.
At one point in the margins he writes cryptically, “I am condemned by being Man.” This in itself seems to explain his wager but with a qualitatively different kind of faith. For the Job in the manuscripts, it seems that the only real relation he can ever, in total faith, have with his God, is a retributive one. Nowhere is it even suggested that one's happiness is necessarily a reward from God for pious and virtuous conduct in the past. This, at least, both the Jobs seem to agree on, going by references in both accounts to sinners who prosper.
Yet it is held that one's suffering is always and necessarily a consequence of folly and vice. The manuscript Job merely gives this a final twist: “I will sin,” he seems to be saying, “and I will thus invite harm on myself; no, I will actually even punish myself for my sins, for in that at least I will fulfill God's word — and what then can He do unto me that I would not have already done to myself?” Job thus perhaps chose to become a living embodiment of God's law, establishing the nature of God as retributive with and in absolute faith.
The question of course is, why? Perhaps Job grew closer to God. His actions denied in absolute terms the possibility of suffering without cause, because he would always have already given cause. Perhaps in this remote and paradoxical way, God would try and win the wager by causing suffering without cause to Job — cause him a suffering for which he could not be held responsible — and thus prove that, after all, the relation between God and Job was not really purely retributive, but could be different.
One can think of the manuscript Job as transforming his life into an extreme version of a laboratory test condition for God's nature: If under these conditions God succeeded... etc. In this, Job's wager amounts to saying to God, “If you are not a purely retributive God, then punish me without cause. But, since I will always give cause and I will always be your instrument of punishment, you will always be retributive, and I will win, unless you win by showing me you are not retributive.”
The obvious question that arises is: Who actually won? That is, when Job died suffering, did he have his answer? To put myself in Job's place, then, if I destroy myself slowly and utterly in absolute accordance with God's laws, do I not actually gain God? And if God nevertheless manages to insert a twist in which I am destroyed in spite of myself — in which it is God who destroys me, and not I myself — then does that not still bring God actively closer? Was Job playing a game in which he was bound to win either way?
The last question, expectedly, is: What were the stakes? What could Job hope to get out of this except what he had already himself put in: suffering and the absolute certainty of God’s being God? And what would God have gained that was any different?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Job wrote it all down — something extremely rare for those times. He wrote it down as his laboratory manual, hoping to leave it behind as the final and conclusive proof of the nature of God.
But it was not to be. Instead, the final suffering that Job had to bear was to be recounted as his Old Testament self, pious and full of faith in a benevolent God. One might say therefore that God won, then, by revealing himself as non-retributive both by this act of suppression and by the account of the Old Testament.
And even in this final resurfacing of Job's account in his own hand, it remains to be seen whether his God will permit this to stay as the authentic version, replacing the one that has stood for millennia in the Old Testament, or have it swept away into the motes of time as just another story.
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[Author’s note] The Job in this piece is, for me, akin to K in Kafka’s The Trial: a figure confronted by forces vastly more powerful, inscrutable and perhaps inexorable than any that can be negotiated by the “average Joe” or K, or P.K.
Kafka’s K strives to make sense of his situation, but this Job simply refuses to negotiate with destructive powers. Instead, he steps right in their way — much like the man in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square — saying, “I will not give you the power to threaten me with destruction, because I am threatening you with my — and thereby — your own destruction. You need me much more than I need you, because you cannot exist without intimidation and destruction, but I can. You fear you cannot exist without me, but I can exist without you.”
To me, this Job reflects an attitude or posture of resistance to overwhelming power rather than submission to it.
Copyright © 2018 by Prem Kumar Vijayan
