• Lecturer: Michael Fishbane (Divinity School, University of Chicago) 
• Respondent: Alan Mittleman (Jewish Theological Seminary)
• Required Readings:

The Book of Job (New Jewish Publication Society translation).

Moshe Greenberg: “Reflections on Job’s Theology", introduction to The Book of Job.

Herbert Fingarette, “Out of the Whirlwind: The Book of Job”, chapter 13 of Mapping Responsibility: Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture.

Listen to the lecture here:

Michael Fishbane's Opening Lecture (0:00 - 1:02:20)

  “How does a traditional culture transform itself from within, revising and also critiquing central values or texts in a fundamental way and even more radically taking these matters to a boundary point and beyond, yielding new values and concerns in their stead? … What are the means and methods whereby such a revisional critique is executed so that the old is retained in the context of its very transformation such that the challenging difference is exposed and evident and yet the bridge is rhetorically thrown over the rupture?” 

     “Job takes up a perennial issue - the meaning and challenge of innocent suffering - and uses it to explore a topic of central significance within ancient Israelite and later Jewish culture; namely, the nature of divine providence with respect to the actions of individuals who ostensibly comply with all the divine demands or commandments.”

 

     “The Book of Job forces a revision of the received tradition of a transcendent monotheism characterized by imminent acts of just retribution - at this theological limit a new theology has to emerge.” 

      “One of the chief stylistic devices in this work is the question -  in a multitude of forms. This feature occurs in every part of the work and unfolds with an increasing intensity and force. So we may now ask the first question: What is a question - in its most primary and phenomenological sense?” 

     “Through such personal queries the point is made: the foundations of nature are not only beyond human ken, they are beyond the reach of Job - the man, the paragon of all mortal beings. And then, follow[ing] these questions of origins, come a second group of questions dealing with the inner pulse of various living forms. All bizarre and strange and wondrous in their own way… All weird bearers of divine life.”

     “What does [Job] experience? Perhaps just this: the ostrich ostriching, the stallion stallioning, the vulture vulturing, and behind and through and above all this God Goding - nothing more and nothing less. Indeed, this is a radical de-centering of the self, not even a re-centering in God, save in the most apophatic sense, since the question undercut any possibility of seeing things from a divine point of view.”

     “The Book of Job thus brings Job and the reader towards a new understanding or mindset. It is an intuition of the mystery – of the deep wisdom darkly coursing in and through all life and only hinting indirectly through the vortex of radical ignorance at God beyond… who is not this wisdom, or within this wisdom, or even the act of providence of this wisdom, but somehow its source and somehow its sponsor and this divine wisdom is even, we should now add, also the human instinct to know the mysteries and to create works of art like that embodied by the author of the book of Job itself.” 

 

Alan Mittleman's Response (1:02:20 -)

     “If Job’s wisdom consists in this sort of non-cognitive or meta-cognitive renunciation of knowledge about the ultimate things and a de-centering or transcendence of self such that he accepts God’s world on its own terms and no longer sees the pertinence of certain stories about justice for the ultimate condition of the world and humanity within it, how does that really make the book of Job different from Stoicism? Or something I know even less about, how does that make the book of Job different from Zen Buddhism?”

     “For Jews, Job has to be part of the Canon. It has to exist in tension with teachings that say very much the contrary thing… Alasdair Macintyre says that Stoicism is a permanent possibility of the human spirit… This may be the place in the Jewish Canon of Scripture where that permanent possibility of the human spirit, speaking a very Hebraic accent, makes its appearance. But we are in trouble if that’s the last word.”