Job 1-20 (Word Biblical Commentary)

1179 Pages·1981·1.73 MB·English

by  David J. A. Clines

WORD
BIBLICAL
COMMENTARY
VOLUME 17
JOB 1–20
DAVID J. A. CLINES

——————General Editors——————
David A. Hubbard
*
Glenn W. Barker
——————Old Testament Editor——————
John D. W. Watts
——————New Testament Editor——————
Ralph P. Martin
WORD BOOKS, PUBLISHER • DALLAS, TEXAS
WORD BIBLICAL COMMENTARY
JOB 1–20
Copyright © 1989 by Word, Incorporated
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the
written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Word biblical commentary.
Includes bibliographies.
1. Bible—Commentaries Collected Works.
BS491.2.W67 220.77´7 81-71768
ISBN 0-8499-0216-9 (vol. 17) AACR2
Printed in the United States of America
The author‘s own translation of the text appears in italic type under the heading
―Translation.‖
To my son
Jeremy
veritate et v
Table of Contents
Editorial Preface
Testimonia
Author‘s Preface
INTRODUCTION:I. ORIENTATION TO THIS BOOK
INTRODUCTION:II. ORIENTATION TO THE BOOK OF JOB
INTRODUCTION:III. ORIENTATION TO BOOKS ABOUT JOB
THE PROLOGUE (1:1–2:13)
JOB‘S FIRST SPEECH (3:1–26)
ELIPHAZ‘S FIRST SPEECH (4:1–5:27)
JOB‘S SECOND SPEECH (6:1–7:21)
BILDAD‘S FIRST SPEECH (8:1–22)
JOB‘S THIRD SPEECH (9:1–10:22)
ZOPHAR‘S FIRST SPEECH (11:1–20)
JOB‘S FOURTH SPEECH (12:1–14:22)
ELIPHAZ‘S SECOND SPEECH (15:1–35)
JOB‘S FIFTH SPEECH (16:1–17:16)
BILDAD‘S SECOND SPEECH (18:1–21)
JOB‘S SIXTH SPEECH (19:1–29)
ZOPHAR‘S SECOND SPEECH (20:1–29)
EDITORIAL PREFACE
The launching of the Word Biblical Commentary brings to fulfillment an enterprise of
several years‘ planning. The publishers and the members of the editorial board met in 1977
to explore the possibility of a new commentary on the books of the Bible that would
incorporate several distinctive features. Prospective readers of these volumes are entitled to
know what such features were intended to be; whether the aims of the commentary have
been fully achieved time alone will tell.
First, we have tried to cast a wide net to include as contributors a number of scholars
from around the world who not only share our aims, but are in the main engaged in the
ministry of teaching in university, college, and seminary. They represent a rich diversity of
denominational allegiance. The broad stance of our contributors can rightly he called
evangelical, and this term is to be understood in its positive, historic sense of a commitment
to Scripture as divine revelation, and to the truth and power of the Christian gospel.
Then, the commentaries in our series are all commissioned and written for the purpose
of inclusion in the Word Biblical Commentary. Unlike several of our distinguished
counterparts in the field of commentary writing, there are no translated works, originally
written in a non-English language. Also, our commentators were asked to prepare their own
rendering of the original biblical text and to use those languages as the basis of their own
comments and exegesis. What may be claimed as distinctive with this series is that it is
based on the biblical languages, yet it seeks to make the technical and scholarly approach to
a theological understanding of Scripture understandable by—and useful to—the fledgling
student, the working minister, and colleagues in the guild of professional scholars and
teachers as well.
Finally, a word must be said about the format of the series. The layout, in clearly
defined sections, has been consciously devised to assist readers at different levels. Those
wishing to learn about the textual witnesses on which the translation is offered are invited
to consult the section headed Notes. If the readers‘ concern is with the state of modern
scholarship on any given portion of Scripture, they should turn to the sections on
Bibliography and Form/Structure/Setting. For a clear exposition of the passage‘s meaning
and its relevance to the ongoing biblical revelation, the Comment and concluding
Explanation are designed expressly to meet that need. There is therefore something for
everyone who may pick up and use these volumes.
If these aims come anywhere near realization, the intention of the editors will have been
met, and the labor of our team of contributors rewarded.
General Editors: David A. Hubbard
*
Glenn W. Barker
Old Testament: John D. W. Watts
New Testament: Ralph P. Martin
Testimonia
The Book of Job is a fireball. It destroys the neat arrangement devised by some
adherents of the religion of Israel to reject painful questions. It disturbs the harmony of
biblical teaching about God‘s plan; it makes room for chance, for the irrational. It refuses to
soften what everyone seeks to control, suffering, and misfortune. It opposes the clarity of a
moral order as the law of history.
C. Duquoc and C. Floristán, Job and the Silence of God
Where Job squats awkwardly upon his ashpit,
Alone on his denuded battlefield,
Scraping himself with blunted Occam Razors
He sharpened once to shave the Absolute …
Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad rise together,
Begin to creak a wooden sarabande;
―Glory to God,‖ they cry, and praise his Name
In epigrams that trail off in a stammer.
Suave Death comes, final as a Händel cadence,
And snaps their limbs like twigs across his knees,
Silenus nods, his finger to his nose.
W. H. Auden, Thomas Epilogises
Some comforters have but one song to sing, and they have no regard to whom they sing
it.
John Calvin
The author of the Book of Job knows what people think, what people say in
whispers—and not just in Israel.
Christian Duquoc, ―Demonism and the Unexpectedness of God‖
De tousles livres de l‘Ancien Testament, JOB est le plus sublime, le plus poignant, le
plus hardi …, le plus énigmatique, le plus decevant et … le plus rebutant.
[God to Job, in the afterlife]
You realize by now the part you played
To stultify the Deuteronomist
And change the tenor of religious thought.
Robert Frost, A Masque of Reason
The Book of Job is the Song of Songs of scepticism, and in it terrifying serpents hiss
their eternal question: Why?
Heinrich Heine
Avoue que tu étais un grand bavard.
Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique
Author’s Preface
―If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.‖ Thus Isaac Newton,
leaving the question open whether he himself was a dwarf on giants‘ shoulders (as is the
case is some formulations of this ancient saying), or whether he himself was a giant on
giants‘ shoulders. Fortunately the question of gigantism does not arise in the present
context of a commentary on Job where the modern commentator is being perpetually cut
down to size by the towering achievement of the Joban author. ―If I have seen further‖
expresses nicely too my ambivalence about the novelties in these volumes, putting the
decision squarely in the reader‘s court; caveat emptor, and let the reader understand. It will
be a surprise to some to know that the greatest anxiety of this commentator on a biblical
book has been the thought, whenever he believes he has stumbled upon a fresh and
preferable interpretation of his text, that he cannot with any probability have been the first
person in twenty-five hundred years to understand his author aright, and that he is
consequently much more likely wrong than right.
There have been giants among commentators on Job. Not only the intrinsic quality of
the book, but also the perceptiveness, ingenuity and tetchiness of scholars of heroic stature
have made the exegesis of the book a titanomachic battlefield. Fohrer‘s commentary is to
my mind the finest, in imagination and theological sensitivity head and shoulders above the
nevertheless outstanding work of Dhorme (sometimes overpraised as the best commentary
on any book of the Bible). In the next rank I would put Duhm, Driver and Gray, Gordis and
n,
(the most recent) Habel. After them, Anderse Pope, Terrien, Peake, Davidson, Hölscher,
h,
Weiser, Delitzsc Horst, and Budde all have their distinctive contributions to make and the
serious commentator must read every word (well, almost) of them all. On the text I
l’s
appreciated in addition de Wilde and Sicre Diaz (in Alonso Schöke commentary). It is a
matter of regret to me that my rhythm of working did not leave me leisure to read
extensively in the great scholars of an earlier age, Dillmann, Hitzig, Schlottmann, and the
others, though I turned to them and others often enough when either my eighteen or so desk
companions or my own imagination did not supply an exegesis that satisfied me.
There have been two books more valuable to me than any commentary, and more often
handled: the lexicon and the concordance. Whether this signals some grand theory of
intertextuality or simply some pragmatic habit I have fallen into, I don‘t rightly know; but I
know I was constantly surprising myself with what precisions, what assurances, what better
readings, emerged almost of their own accord from the systematic study of the words
themselves. Not that a commentary should remain on the level of words; single-minded
concentration on words is the strength, and the weakness, of the work of Dhorme. My
intent has always been to understand every detail in the context of the total book, and I can
testify that to keep in motion a perpetual interplay between the part and the whole has been
the greatest intellectual pleasure of the entire work.
I have always, dear reader, had an implied reader present to my mind; not you, perhaps,
because my implied reader is a composite of real people, significant others, whom I would
not be so unkind as to mention by name. Let us say that among them is a Hebraist eager to
challenge my philological decisions, a committed Old Testament theologian, left of center,
who will pick up every word to do with society, psychology, and God, a friend who will
recognize immediately the sentences addressed directly to her and her religious sensibilities
but published freely like messages in the personal columns of The Times, a picker up of
trifles who will dip in here and there and whom I hope to seduce into reading on, and an
enthusiast who will quite properly thank me less for what I have said than for the hares I
have set running in his mind. This implied reader of the subjoined Enigma Variations is
also of course an ideal reader, for upon none of my friends (nor, come to think of it, my
enemies) would I actually wish to impose the task of reading this book right through. So
along with the handful of readers, implied, ideal, or actual, who will properly speaking read
these books, there will be a larger clientele who will use them; such too have been in the
forefront of my mind.
Among the features of this commentary that I hope will prove to be userfriendly is the
constant reference in the textual notes to several English versions. I have suspected that one
of the reasons why persons in their right mind might want to pick up a commentary on Job
is to find out why the standard English versions of the text under study differ so amazingly
from one another, and whether at any particular instance it can be argued that one rendering
is better than others. (I have inevitably found, incidentally, that to weigh the alternative
renderings of fifteen English versions of every line has been a most constructive process for
me as a Hebraist and critic, leading sometimes, admittedly, to a state of palsied indecision
but more often to a sharpened perception of the text.) For the user‘s convenience too,
though also out of conviction, I have most often tried to say near the beginning of the
comment on any verse what I think it is in general about and how I think it connects up
with what precedes it, and only then how that general sense is supported by the actual
words in their actual sequence. But occasionally, and especially when I have come to a
famous crux, I have written a kind of stream of consciousness commentary that starts with
the problem and only by stages, like a detective story except that I lay no red herrings,
moves toward my preferred solution. For one other feature of the commentary that users
will, I hope, appreciate I can take no credit at all but must myself thank the editors for their
conception of a piece of Explanation at every chapter‘s end (or so). Under that heading I
have tried hard to stand a little way off from the text to ask what has been going on and
what it all means. Any user of this commentary who reads nothing more than the
Explanations would have the gist of the perspective adopted here.
Writing a commentary on Job is nearly as dangerous as composing a ninth symphony.
Many commentators reveal in their prefaces the real losses and anguishes they have
endured in the course of writing, though, like Job, most of them have not actually died in
the process. But even if one does not suffer objectively any more than the average biblical
commentator or the average human being, living for day after month after year with the
powerful, insistent and imaginative depiction of suffering and its significance sensitizes the
commentator to one‘s own experiences and to the signs of suffering that spring up
everywhere in the world about.
Nevertheless, I am glad to report, I have rarely wished to assent to the most frequent
comment made to this commentator by friends, relatives and acquaintances: How
depressing to spend your days with Job, that book of unrelieved gloom! The truth is, and no
one who spends more than half a hour with this commentary will be very surprised to learn
it, that increasingly my response has been: On the contrary! Job represents the vitality of
the human spirit which refuses to be humiliated, not even by God, and especially not by
theologians! Reading and close-reading the Book of Job, the most intense book
theologically and intellectually of the Old Testament, has been a perennially uplifting and
not infrequently euphoric experience. The craftsmanship in the finest details, the rain of
metaphor, the never-failing imagination of the poet, is surpassed only by the variety and
delicacy of the theological ideas and the cunning of this most open of texts at confronting
its readers with two new questions along with any answer.
What is going on in commentaries and commentary writing? I am asking myself this all
the time. Reading in Montaigne one day, I chanced on this passage (Florio‘s translation):
There‘s more adoe to enterpret interpretations, than to interpret things: and more
bookes upon bookes, then upon any other subject. We doe but enter-glose [intergloss] our
selves. All swarmeth with commentaries: Of Authors their is great penury. Is not the
chiefest and most famous knowledge of our ages, to know how to understand the wise? …
[The latest] is got-up but one inch above the shoulders of the last save one (bk 3, ch 13;
.
Everyman ed 3:327).
This is good knockabout stuff, in its last sentence incidentally taking a side-swipe at the
aphorism with which, in one of its forms, this preface opened (though Robert K. Merton, in
his otherwise estimable, and exhaustive, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean
Postscript [New York: Free Press, 1965] seems to know nothing of the Montaigne
passage). It suitably shames the commentator, for a minute or two, and leads him (that is,
me) to sobering reflections on the parasitic nature of the critic compared to the creativity of
the original artist. But what it leads to wondering in the end is whether there is such a great
gulf between text and comment, whether the work of the critic and the work of the artist are
not perhaps of the same substance, whether the work of art does not perhaps stand in need
of the commentator to ensure its survival into each new generation, and whether,
religiously speaking, not just the author but also the reader must be inspired. If, as I believe,
meaning comes into existence at the intersection between the text and the reader, texts need
readers to become meaningful, for meaningful always means meaningful to someone. And
texts, especially classic texts, Job, Dante, and Shakespeare, need commentators to become
fully themselves; if they are texts capable of being commented on, they in a way include
their commentaries within themselves, like the iridescent feathers of a peacock‘s tail, as the
Irish theologian Scotus Erigena put it when he argued that Holy Scripture contains an
infinite number of meanings within itself. So if a commentary is a kind of extension of the
work itself, an afterglow of the text, its afterimage, or rather its afterlife, it must not be a
mere pragmatic and functionalist explication of hard words and unfamiliar customs (like
the books of Hölscher and de Wilde) but must worm its way into the text, replay the text,
milk it, worry it—all these images for an intimate and exhausting encounter with its
imagery, its structures, its ideas. All this is leading up to a justification of the rather
considerable size of this commentary, perhaps the longest on the Book of Job since
Gregory the Great. Most people feel that the Book of Job is already long enough, and many
find it full of windy and tedious words. I of course believe that it is exactly as long as it
ought to be, just as Il Seraglio has exactly the right number of notes, despite what the
prince said to Mozart. And I of course believe that this commentary contains no
redundancy, and that a commentary faithful to the spirit of the Book of Job will be, like it,
ample, full and voluminous.
This is the time to express my thankfulness for the many people who have given their
support to this author over the almost ten years this book has been in preparation. Perhaps
the most important background to the book has been the Department of Biblical Studies in
Sheffield in which I have worked since 1964, and where I have enjoyed the inestimable
benefit of adventurous and creative colleagues. I name them all, because in some way each
has contributed to this book. They are: Loveday Alexander, James Atkinson, Bruce
Chilton, Philip Davies, David Gunn, David Hill, Andrew Lincoln, Ralph Martin, David
Payne, John Rogerson, Peter Southwell, and Tony Thiselton. The University of Sheffield
has granted me three terms of study leave that have been spent in the writing, as well as
financial support from its University Research Fund for some of the costs of research. To
the Master and Fellows of St Edmund‘s House (now College), Cambridge, I am deeply
grateful for electing me to a Visiting Fellowship in January-April 1986, and providing the
ambience for the most sustained period of writing I have ever had. My own college of St
John‘s has given me its hospitality on numerous occasions when I have been working at the
University Library in Cambridge. The residents and readers of Tyndale House, Cambridge,
have often been a stimulus or a sounding board, especially at the manche Teepausen for
which Tyndale is famous.
I am especially grateful to several people who have contributed to the text of this work.
Hugh Williamson kindly gave me ready access to his extensive bibliography on Old
Testament texts. Helen Orchard worked on the bibliography to the Introduction. Philip Chia
brought consistency to the biblical citations. Heather McKay read the greater part of the
work and made many valuable suggestions for improvements. David Deboys helped
especially on Septuagintal matters.
And then there are the typists, Pauline Bates, Rosemarie Kossov, Jane Holden, Andy
Davidson, Marcia Crookes, Betty Scholey, and Susan Halpern, and others I fear I have
forgotten, who have spent precious hours of their lives on my neat but nevertheless difficult
manuscripts.
The Old Testament editor of the series, John Watts, has given me both freedom and urging
in due measure, and I thank him and Pat Wienandt of Word Books for their care and
attention to many matters both large and small.
More than one large-scale commentary on Job has not progressed beyond the first
volume; I hope not to disappoint readers, but to provide a second volume in a much shorter
time than the first volume has taken. Whether it will ―recapture That first fine careless
rapture‖ that A. S. Peake said A. B. Davidson never could after his first volume on Job
remains to be seen. In the meantime, I conclude my preface in much the same spirits as
those of the first commentator on Job to have had his book published in English, Theodore
Beza, and quote in sympathetic vein these lines from his preface dated January 23, 1587:
Seeing the troubles of these times and the dangers wherein this commonwealth now
standeth … I am … minded to expound the histories of Job, in which, as in other books of
the holie Scripture, there are many darke and hard places, insomuch as I must here of
necessitie sometime sayle, as it were, among the rocks: and yet I hope I shal not make any
shipwracke.
D.J.A.C.
February 28, 1989
Introduction:
I. Orientation to This Book
Mega biblion, mega kakon: a big book is a big evil. The proverb is true for the reader
almost as much for as for the writer. These first pages are intended to enable readers to use
this book for their own purposes, and not to foreswear it for its forbiddingness.
By way of Introduction, there is, following this orientation to the commentary itself, an
Orientation to the Book of Job, so that one may read, as one runs, in the space of a few
pages, ―what the book is all about.‖ It will not therefore be necessary to read the entire
commentary to find out what this commentator thinks, in general, the book is ―all about.‖ If
a thing is worth saying, it is worth saying briefly.
There are, however, two drawbacks to finding out what the Book of Job is all about.
The first is that no one can say, and certainly not this commentator, what the Book of Job is
all about, not even given unlimited space and time. For it is a part of the Book‘s greatness
that whenever we think we have it mastered, it surprises us with new angles that we realize
we haven‘t yet properly taken into consideration. The second drawback is that ―what the
book is all about‖—which is to say, its meaning—varies from reader to reader. For
meanings are not properties of books, but are understandings created in the minds of
readers who are intent upon reading books. And as many readers, as many readings. This
realization does not have to lead to despair of making sense of Job or to abandonment of
the quest for superior and more persuasive meanings. But it does put the reader and the
reader‘s concern in a very much more prominent place than is customary. In line with this
emphasis on the reader, the second part of the Orientation sketches some particular readings
of Job that might be generated by a sample of readers with particular stances and
commitments—for example, feminists, materialists, vegetarians, and Christians.
There is not a lot in this Orientation about the traditional questions usually dealt with in
Introductions to commentaries—date, authorship, sources, and the like. This is because I
regard these questions as mostly extrinsic to the book itself and therefore to the question of
meaning or interpretation, which is always for me the primary question. No doubt there are
many interesting things to be said about how the Book of Job may have developed into the
book it now is. But I must confess to having spent almost all my time on the book as it now
is, without thinking very much about how it came to be in its present form. Of its author or
date of composition I frankly know nothing, and my speculations are not likely to be worth
more than the many guesses that already exist. However, I do admit that it would be
doctrinaire to rule out these questions altogether, and I agree that my reading of the book as
it now stands does make some historical judgments, such as the assumptions that the book
is written by a Hebrew or Jew several centuries before the Christian era. So the reader
curious about such matters will find in the Orientation some few remarks on strictly
historical or genetic matters.
The third part of this Introduction is an Orientation to Works about the Book of
Job—which is to say, a Bibliography. Unlike bibliographies in most commentaries, even
those in the Word Biblical Commentary series, this is intended to be a reasonably
comprehensive bibliography. It does not contain only items I have read or seen, though I
think I have seen most that are in Sheffield, Cambridge University Library or the British
Library in the British Museum, London. It does not usually include works in languages
with which I have no familiarity. There are several reasons why I decided to compile such a
bibliography.
1. There is no such bibliography anywhere in print.
2. I thought it was important to consider the quantity—and the range—of works that
have been inspired by the Book of Job. There are certainly more on the Book of Psalms, but
I would be surprised if there were more on any other book of the Old Testament. The
existence of these works is in itself a commentary on the Book of Job.
3. I became increasingly dissatisfied with restricting my horizon to the socalled
scholarly works. Scholars quote scholars and create their own canon of approved literature
on the Book of Job. Those writings that are not soon cited by commentators do not
generally get cited by subsequent commentators. If a writer on Job has been dead for more
than a hundred years, or wrote in a language other than English, French, or German, or
addressed people who were not scholars, or was published by a publishing house
committed to a particular religious viewpoint—it is very unlikely that the views of that
author will be taken into any account by the writer of a scholarly commentary. I should
know, because that is to a large extent what I too have been doing throughout this
commentary. Of course, when it comes to technical questions about philology, unscholarly
remarks can be safely ignored. But when it is a matter of large-scale interpretation, of the
meaning of the book as a whole and not just of a particular word or verse, one does not
need to be a technically trained scholar to have valuable insights. So my ―undiscriminating‖
bibliography, which includes sermons and works of popular devotion alongside vast works
of erudition, is meant as a kind of atonement for the principle of scholarly apartheid which
reigns elsewhere in the commentary.
4. The writings on Job of older commentators, including the Fathers of the Christian church
and the oldest Jewish interpreters, are listed here deliberately. For I came to understand that
there can be no serious distinction between ―interpretation‖ and the ―history of
interpretation.‖ At the moment of publication of this commentary it becomes part of the
―history of interpretation‖ and no different in principle—however much in content and
quality—from those of Chrysostom, Rashi, Oecolampadius, Schultens, and the others. One
day I was browsing in the 1,500-page commentary of Sebastian Schmidt (1670); when I
read his heartfelt Comment on the last verse of Job, Nihil in hoc v. difficultatis, ―Nothing of
difficulty in this verse,‖ that unique blend of disappointment and relief only known to
long-distance commentators, I knew it would be an insult to him and a sign of
small-mindedness in myself if he, and the hundreds of honest workers like him, were
omitted from my bibliography. The history of a work‘s ―reception,‖ we are belatedly
coming to realize, is part of the meaning of the work.