Job's Curse-A Close analysis of The Book of Job translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin (New York: W.W. Norton 1999)
and the night that said 'a male has been conceived!" (3:1, p.57) The conventional, moralistic reading of the skeletal story of Job tends to take into consideration only the frame narrative of the tale. The framing Job prose fragment suggests a rather straightforward narrative of virtue rewarded, much like an Aesop's fable with a happy ending. The framing prose narrative tells the tale of a man named Job, a good and prosperous man who loves God. Over the course of the narrative, Job is tested by the loss of everything that is dear to him. Then, Job is eventually rewarded for his resistance to the temptation to curse God and to give up. However, a considerably more complex figure of Job emerges in a close analysis of the debate between Job and his friends in the poetic part of the tale. This poetry takes the form of philosophical musing, and is written in a considerably different style than the framing prose. The poetry makes up the bulk of the Biblical text, and, as seen in the above excerpt, provides no easy answers about the nature of God's justice, and retributive justice in general. True, Job does not explicitly curse God during the more ambiguously worded poetic segments of his tale.
Sheol, as seen by the suffering Job, is a shadowy place, not a place of clear judgment, and the only thing Job is sure of is that it is different than earth. Is it ironic that Job does not know that he will be rewarded later on, for his suffering, or why he suffers? Perhaps it is not so ironic. 101) Why, essentially do even some animals frolic with ease, while good people suffer? Job's answer to his own query is bitter and mocking, namely that there is no justice, for Sheol is the fate that waits for everyone. The divine is alien and harsh as the world God made to house the suffering as well as the happiness of men, and both gods and humans are deaf to pleas for pity. Because of what happens to him, Job seems to have a greater wisdom than his friends, who hope that the world is understandable, in the easy folkloric style the of frame narrative, where the man who does not curse God like his wife urges is aided and rewarded in the end. He cannot right his wrongs in a retributive economy of justice, as envisioned by his friends. The reader can 'know' Job's eventual fate in the story, but the reader cannot truly know what awaits Job, or any human being, after all existence is terminated, or if the guilty will be punished and the good will be rewarded like the frame tale promises. Job tells his friends he is not passively resigned, and does not bless his lot. At the end Job still cannot weigh out the winds, apportion the water, set quotas of rain, and fix routes for the thundershowers like God. He says he does not care that he is born male, or that he lives in a world created by God. Thus, in the end Job does not get his day in court, to explain his feelings and the lack of reasons for his suffering. Eventually, Job casts his eyes at the heavens and cries: "Why are the wicked allowed to live/ Grow old and win prosperity?" (21:1-2, p. But this power is not equal to the power of God.
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