W.E.I.R.D. Science — and Ethics and Politics

            The joke on campus when I was "in the academy" was that our colleagues in the Psych Biz had given us (largely) the psychology of the American college sophomore. American and other academic psychologists are starting to take the joke more seriously, trying to figure out how to adjust to having a subject pool from backgrounds that are largely W.E.I.R.D.: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Most people in the world are not WEIRD; indeed, large numbers of Americans don't hit all those elements. Among the majority of people — historically a substantial majority — the "R" wouldn't be "Rich" but "Religious (more or less)."

            Being oblivious to religion can have results ranging from silly to disastrous.

            Local example: Southern California Edison Electric Company scheduled a power outage for my neighborhood for 10 PM Saturday, 15 April 2017, through 6 AM on the 16th. Sunday, 16 April 2017 was Easter Sunday, and apparently the schedulers at SoCal Edison were ignorant of the custom among many Ventura County natives to have family and friends over for Easter eating and would have refrigerators loaded with food that weekend, in some cases too much food to tolerate up to 8 hours without power — if everything went well during the maintenance work and to say nothing about having a crew working extra hours on Easter weekend.

            So come on, SoCal Ed! There'd be an excuse if you had to calculate on your own Easter's falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. But you don't; nowadays you check a calendar a month or so after you spot Easter stuff sprouting up at Kroger's or six weeks after those dumb-ass Cadbury Crème Egg commercials start showing up on television.

            California Christians can't complain about persecution, but there's definitely insensitivity, indifference, and ignorance.

            More significant example: No plan for "peace in the Mideast" will work that assumes that Jerusalem is just a city and that the key issues in the conflicts are rational interests in land, water, resources generally and so forth— and ignores religion, ethnic identities, self-respect, and self-respect's sinful sibling, Pride.

            Significant for capital "D" Democrats in the United States: No plan to regain majority-party power — not membership or sympathies or numbers in polling, but power — will work unless it gets more people to vote Democratic who are Western(ized)/White or White-ish, schooled a bit but not overly Educated, recently de-industrialized, and far less Rich by world standards than Religious.

            So come on, Democrats! You should know this stuff at least for the Abrahamic religions — and if you're culturally educated, not just schooled, you should know which ones the "Abrahamic religions" are. For example: in the Hebrew Bible, the 24^th Psalm begins, "The Earth is the Eternal's, and all that it contains, / The sea and all that dwell therein; / For He has founded it upon the ocean, and upon the flood." The psalmist assumes a labor theory of property: something is yours if you make it, with your labor, not as an investment or because you're Pharaoh ordering around forced labor by your peasants in the off-season, and slaves. And from there you can go on to the Prophets on social justice and, explicitly with Christians, indirectly with others get to the parts on basic decency spelled out in Matthew 25.

            We are all "values" voters, and if people accept those basics on our absolute human duties — and Jews, Christians, and Muslims damn well should — you ought to be able to get them to vote those values.

Quick Catechism for Why Bernie Sanders Is Headed to Hell (and You Probably Are Too)

"'And Bernie Sanders, who doesn't believe in God ... how in the world are we gonna let Bernie [...]?' asked Mark Burns, co-founder and CEO of the Now Network [...]" opening for Donald Trump. "'Listen, Bernie got to get saved, he's got to meet Jesus. I don't know, he's got to have a coming-to-Jesus meeting,' Burns added [...] ahead of a Trump event in Hickory, N.C."

I sometimes joked to my students that we were living an old joke about the University of Chicago as "Jewish professors teaching Catholicism to classrooms of atheists" — except I needed to explain Protestantism as well, and my students were almost all believing Christians, even if they weren't always very sure of what they believed. .

Anyhow, this much for a "Rich's Notes" cheat-sheet oversimplifying a couple millennia of Christian theology but giving context for what the sort-of Reverend Mr. Mark Banks said about a secular Jew like Bernie Sanders, which would also apply to a religious Jew like Joe Lieberman and maybe to most Roman Catholics and lukewarm Protestants.

First off, there is no salvation unless you make it to the Father. No matter how well you live your life, if you're not with God you're going to Hell to burn forever in the Lake of Fire (or more interesting and baroque torments if Dante got it right). After that,
      No one comes to the Father but through the Son. But how do you come to and through the Son?
             No one comes to the Son but through Holy Church: By Baptism and the other Sacraments of the Church one is washed free from Original Sin and kept in line for salvation.
              Alternatively and simultaneously, "By Faith and Faith alone shall you be saved." And how does one have capital "F" Faith (i.e., the true one)? Well, one experiences Christ and accepts Jesus as one's personal savior (capital "s" optional). Now, does one do that by striving on one's own? How can sinful, fallen, degenerate, innately depraved Man come to Faith?
                    Not on your own: God saves whom He will save and damns the rest — the great majority. So, By Grace and Grace alone will you be saved, except you probably won't be.
                           However ... "A tree is known by its fruits," and there are signs of Grace, including one's living a godly, productive, prosperous life in a godly community and gets accepted by a Church that is a gathering of the saved and live by its rules — like in the good old days of Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts among the Separatists and Puritans who left their stamp big time on what became the US of A.

Got it? That's some basics out of your old-time, hard-assed Christianity in the tradition of St. Paul in a bad mood, plus St. Augustine and Luther and Calvin and our own colonial-era Jonathan Edwards and the Mather boys Cotton and Increase. 

So of course Bernie Sanders doesn't believe in God in any way that counts, and there's a fair chance you don't either. Or at least that's the mainstream, or at least a central major stream, of Christian belief, with more liberal ideas always around but often losing out. The ideas of St. Augustine became "Catholic"; his competitors got anathematized and excommunicated. The Medieval Church loosened up a bit — for political reasons Dante has a Roman emperor in Heaven — but Martin Luther and the Reformation brought back tougher doctrine (including, with Luther, on Jews).

Personally, I have no problem with such doctrines, except when combined with unCalvinist ideas on free will and choice and the idea that it is the duty of Christians to save the heathen: in which case devout Christians can become annoying. And demanding a US that is a Christian nation where only those who've come to Jesus can hold office — well, that violates the prohibition of religious tests in our Constitution and undermines the USA as a secular Republic that guarantees freedom of religion. 

Sermonette: Arguing with, and Appreciating, Deuteronomy 21.10-25.19 ("Ki Teitzei")

Sermonette

28 August 2015

Temple Ner Ami, Camarillo, CA

(1650 words, ca. 12 and a half minutes)

            So the child says to the rabbi, "Rabbi, why did the Holy One set the minyan at ten?" And the rabbi replies, "That is simple, my child. A minyan of ten guarantees that for every issue of importance to the congregation — and {shuddering to recall} many, many issues of no importance whatever! — there should be at least a dozen opinions."

            Okay, a lot of Jews, it is said, like to argue, and I grew up in Chicago: among another group of people who definitely like to argue.

            And not argue just with each other, at least not among Jews.

            One image of Israel's relationship with God is a loving betrothal, as in the final prayer when putting on tefillin, or in a mystic reading of the Song of Songs — or with greeting the Sabbath bride as we did with L'Cha Dodi. But marriages, especially after the first six hundred years or so, can get stormy, and another image of the Jewish relationship with God is the wrestling match: Jacob wrestles with the angel and is renamed "Israel": "He who struggles with God." Abraham dickers with God over the destruction of Sodom, and Job in the poem of Job is far from patient with God. In the long poem in the center of the book of Job, Job is ticked and accuses God of injustice. Ultimately vehemently, Job presents his indictment to a silent God — or silent to the climax of the poem — and the Book of Job as a whole suggests that without such an argument there may be no true encounter with God.

            Which brings me to the Torah reading for this Shabbat, Ki Teitzei — a substantial hunk of Deuteronomy — where most of us nowadays would have some questions — and one or two places where we should have objections. And it brings me, as someone ignorant of Hebrew, to what I can recite and talk about. Baruch ata Adonai natein haTorah: The often-repeated and expanded upon, "Blessed are You, Eternal, who gives the Torah."

            We bless God for giving us Torah, the Teaching: God's teachings, commandments, injunctions, laws.

            And I got thinking about that blessing for Torah.

            I don't think I'd bless the California State Assembly for giving us the California Revised Statutes, and I know I cursed them (quietly) for allowing photo-enforced traffic lights with two-second yellows. Still, even when being welcomed to Ventura County with $600 in fines and fees for my first moving violation since I was 18 — even then, I don't think I would have found anything in California law as, let's say, problematic as the "Rules for waging holy war" in Deuteronomy. Most of those rules are in last week's reading, but Ki Teitzei starts out with the rules for a victorious Israelite soldier seizing from "among the captives a beautiful woman" and appropriating her — seizing her — for a wife.

            Also, well … for 35 years I lived in a college town around the corner from a consolidated high school and occasionally fantasized dire punishments for teens who are "stubborn and rebellious" (and noisy) and for any over-age kid who's "a glutton and," way more so, "a drunkard." Still, having them stoned to death as Deuteronomy commands (21.21) seems excessive — and "a little bordering upon cruelty."

            When we bless God for "Torah and mitzvot," what should we be blessing God for?

            First off we should be thankful for the arguments within our Scriptures and beyond where it's a question of whether swords should be beaten into plowshares, as Isaiah says, and we "learn war no more," or the other way around. The prophet Joel tells us to "Hammer your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears" and rather than ceasing to learn war anymore, to "Train even your weaklings to be warriors" (3.10).

            Also there are — always — historical contexts and the need to be not so open-minded that our brains fall out, but humble not just before God but also with our ancestors, and honor their progress in compassion.

            For a famous example, Christians criticize the Law of "an eye for an eye." Well, back in the day of Hammurabi and Moses, that law served to limit violence. Somebody knocks out the eye of a guy in the ancient world (or our world), and he'd want to kill the offender. And American Christians might keep in mind that if the US had stuck to "an eye for an eye," we would have paused after killing four or five thousand Afghans in revenge for 9/11 — and see what, if anything could be done against al-Qaeda by law. "An eye for an eye" can be idealistic even today.

            More specific to today's reading, Ki Teitzei commands, "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped […]; he shall dwell with you [… and]; you shall not oppress him" (23.15). The Code of Hammurabi, nearly four thousand years ago "decreed death as the penalty for sheltering a fugitive slave" (RSV 244 n.); and the laws of the American colonies and the United States required returning fugitive slaves until 1864.

            More generally, we have to use our imaginations and think about what evolving Torah meant to our ancestors.

            A nice Jewish boy, if secular, Steven Pinker, wrote in 2011 a long and fascinating and controversial book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. "What? — Violence declined?!?", you will say — which is why Pinker needed to write a big book. "Don't we live in peculiarly violent times of existential threat!?"

            Well, no, not really. There are existential threats to the human species from asteroids and comets and thermonuclear war. And the last period of global warming back in the Middle Ages was great for the Vikings but horrible for people living in hot, dry places like, well, like around here, and our current round of global warming will produce, in many places, like around here, very tough times.

            Still, nothing going on nowadays compares with the bloodbaths of the two world wars of the 20^th century, and my students in a course called just "Massacres" came up with the scary statistic that those two world wars and some 80 million dead were barely a blip on the graph in the increase in human population. World War II was an existential threat to Jews and Roma and did (thank God) destroy the Third Reich; but the 20^th-century World Wars were a spasmodic exception to a general trend of improvement.

            "Genocide" is a modern word, but large-scale massacres are ancient, and we find it hard to believe that Violence Has Declined because we can barely imagine how violent a world our ancestors lived in during the anarchy that preceded civilization and the violence and oppression under early kings and empires.

            Scribes in really ancient, ancient Mesopotamia wrote of kingship coming down from heaven as a gift from the gods. Well, yeah; having a king meant that now all you had to fear in the lethal violence category was the king and his thugs from the capital and not the local free-lance thugs. Early civilization was less violent and brutal than what preceded it, but that still leaves a lot of room for violence and brutality. Our ancestors got a taste of civilized life in Egypt, and my ancient history book says the Hebrews weren't treated much differently from Pharaoh's other subjects — and our ancestors in Egypt thought they were treated like slaves. And when our later ancestors demanded a king, the Prophet Samuel described in gory detail how even an Israelite king will tax them and draft them "and you shall be his slaves" (1 Samuel 8.10-18). Oppressive kings were better than constant clan warfare and small-group violence, but they were bad and could be very bad. So, Blessed be the Eternal, who gave the yoke of the law to restrain and guide individuals and (on balance, eventually) curb violence and oppression.

            And blessed be the Eternal for Torah not just as Law but as Teaching and a Way of life: for giving us a creation myth where God looks upon all the work of of Creation on the 6^th Day and finds in "very good" (Genesis 1.31) — a phrase a great teacher of comparative religion says "gives a lilt to the whole attitude toward nature" and life in Torah, and makes Torah the ground of "This beautiful tree, the tree of life." <http://billmoyers.com/content/wisdom-faith-christianity-judaism/>

            And, indeed, the weirder rules in Deuteronomy in the reading for today repeat the kind of Rule of Separations in the Book of Leviticus — and these also make sense.

            Torah teaches that in the beginning God brought order out of chaos; and the rules to keep fabrics all of one material and farm fields of one crop, the rigid rules on sex and gender and age status — these are bad ideas today but long served as walls against chaos.

            We need "New Rules!" about now, and Reform Judaism helps provide them, but the impulse behind the old rules was necessary. Back when humans were beginning to get the world organized in our minds and cultures, we needed strong categories for animals and crops and fabrics, even for men's clothing and women's clothing; we needed at least regulation of the violence of frequent wars and constant slavery — and rules to keep in check royal egomaniacs.

            And many of the rules really are good ideas: expanding our circles of empathy, sympathy, of feeling and concern. In the Torah reading for today, in the midst of a bunch of rigid regulations on punishments and inheritance and "Levirate" marriage. In the midst of lawyerly details comes the rule, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain" (25.4). Even an ox deserves reward for his labor, a standard of justice and compassion that we have not met today.

            Blessed is the Eternal, who's given the Torah to Israel.

Biblical Dissent: Job and Ecclesiastes, Part II: Job (3 Aug. 2013)

My Favorite Hero: Job

  

"God is great; God is good; / And we thank Him for our food."

— Children's Prayer on Restaurant Menus, US 1950s.

I heard upon his dry dung heap

That man cry out who cannot sleep,

"If God is God, he is not good;

If God is good, he is not God.

Take the even; take the odd."

— Archibald MacLeish, JB

            My favorite hero is Job, from the Book of Job.

            When I was a boy, I liked Batman and Wonder Woman and the other superfolk, but my favorite hero was Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel got destroyed by Superman and a bunch of lawyers in 1953,and for a long time after that I mostly did without heroes. Then I took a Bible-as-Lit course in college and learned about Job.

            The dating here gets tricky — my Oxford Annotated Revised Standard Version (1962) tells me the Book of Job is earlier than the Book of Ecclesiastes — but Job confronts and wrestles with the great philosophical questions expressed so robustly by Koheleth ("the Preacher," "Solomon," "Ecclesiastes"); and in the center of the Book of Job, in The Poem of Job, Job also calls out, and condemns, God.

            Now that take 'nads!

            The Book of Job deals with "The Problem of Evil," which is an issue for monotheistic religions unless, I guess, you worship Satan as the One God (in which case there'd be "The Problem of Good").

            "If God is great" — all-powerful, all-knowing, and all that — "he is not good": look at all the suffering and evil in the world. Alternatively, "If God is good" — all good, perfectly good, good all the time, by any sensible definition of "good" — "he is not God": suffering and evil again; God might want to do good, but lacks the power, which makes him less than our monotheistic view of God.

            One way to solve this problem is to say that the One-God theory is wrong, that there is no God. That elegantly solves the problem of evil (hey, shit happens!), but, as Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out in an essay<> a colleague called far too clear and simple to have been what a French Existentialist meant, atheism raises other problems. These problems can be summed up "by such terms – perhaps a little grandiloquent – as anguish, abandonment and despair." Atheism easily allows the important bumper sticker "Shit happens," but it leads also to such conclusions as (1) that Koheleth with his "Emptiness! Emptiness! All is Emptiness!" was an optimist, and (2) therefore the motto of your sophomore-cynic roommate was right: "Life sucks and then you die." The atheistic conclusion won't work for Job, however, not as a character in the Hebrew Bible. Torah begins, in the most popular translation of the line, "In the beginning, God […]" (Genesis 1.1). The Hebrew and Greek-Christian Scriptures assume God.

            Another way to solve the problem of evil is to say God is Two: the Zoroastrian or Manichaean way, with a god of light and a god of darkness, good and evil, equal in power. That works, as does a polytheism with many competing gods, some mischievous, some, from a human point of view, dangerously destructive. "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" has an ominous ring to it (Bhagavad Gita11.32).

            A third way is to say God is One and Three, and go with the Christian mythos. ("Mythos" is a way to say "myth" without getting into quite so much trouble or, in my case, having to affirm yet again that I take myths very seriously). In this version of things, you can get a "theodicy" like John Milton's Paradise Lost and "assert eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men" (I.5-16). That is, shortly after the Beginning God created Adam and Eve and we got

Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore[d] us, and [we] regain the blissful Seat […].

There was the Original Sin, and that sin didn't just lose humankind our innocence and Eden but genetically (as 'twere) damned Adam, Eve, and all their progeny — us, every human — not just to death but damnation: the eternal lake of fire and all that (Revelation 20.14). Unless you have total faith in Christ Jesus and accept Him as your personal savior and believe and believe rightly — or maybe you're one of the Elect from the beginning of time, and that is that — unless you're saved, you're damned, and, as Jonathan Edwards told us in a tradition going back to St. Augustine, most of us are "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and damned, damned, damned.

            And, to be rigorously logical, that probably includes Job.

            The Book of Job, as it stands, was emphatically a period piece even in its time: a story about a guy not even a Hebrew let alone an Israelite or Jew; and Job is definitely not a Christian.

            In the world of Job, God is, and God is One, and Jesus is way in the future. Orthodox Jews may have come to believe in an afterlife, and the Christian tradition is strongly into heaven and hell — but in Job as in Ecclesiastes there is death and the grave and Sheol: basically, when you're dead, you're dead. The poet of Beowulf told a story set "In that day of this life," before Christianity reached his people, and as another Nordic type put it, in such a context, after death, "The rest is silence" (Hamlet 5.2.356).

            If there is to be divine justice for Job, or any justice, it must be in this life.

            So "there was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job," and this man, the Narrator and then God Himself assure us, "was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil" (prose Prolog, opening lines). And in this once-upon-a-time, the sons of God, the divine beings, come into the divine court, and Satan, the Adversary, is among them. And then, at one time very famously, God and Satan have a bit of a colloquy on Job. The Adversary, doing his job — he's like a prosecuting attorney — cynically asks, "Does Job fear God for nothing?" In ancient, pastoral-society terms, Job is rich and successful; he has been well rewarded for his worship, a worship Job has performed with a bookkeeper's fastidiousness: sacrificing for himself and his family an amount more than necessary to pay for any minor or inadvertent sins.

            Take away the goodies, Satan says — although far more impressively — and Job will curse God.

            Now, for a longer-form summary of the frame-story of Job, see Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Cartmanland" episode (season 5, #6). The short form is that Satan destroys everything Job has that a patriarchal society would consider his — which includes children, but Mrs. Job is spared for plot purposes — and Job blesses God: "Naked I came out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return; the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord" (1.21). So Satan wants to go two out of three: "But put forth your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face" (2.4). God says, OK, so long as Satan doesn't kill Job (which would ruin the bet), and Satan does a real number on Job, physically, afflicting him "with loathsome sores," full-body. So broke and broken (in the RSV translation), Job "took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes. Then his wife said to him, 'Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God, and die.' But he said to her, 'You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?' In all this Job did not sin with his lips" (2.9-10).

            Finishing the Prolog set-up, Job's three friends — sort of friends — come "to condole with him and comfort him. And when they saw him from afar, they did not recognize him," he looked that bad; "and they raised their voices and wept; and they rent their robes and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great" (2.11-13).

            And here beginneth the Poem of Job, which you may not have read in Sunday School — skipping over to the mostly pious prose Epilog, where God restores everything to Job, except the dead children and servants: the original ones, that is; he does get new ones, and the new kids are just great.

            Now it may very well be that the editors of the Book of Job figured you'd skip the poetry part, but in any event the editors at the end of the Book have God condemn the three Comforters: "For you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job" (42.7) — a key point I'll return to, a couple times.

            God's line to the Comforters is an er steht! moment, as your rabbi might have yelled at you, if you were making wise-ass objections to, well, most anything, and he were old-fashioned Ashkenazi: in this context, "It is written!"

            The God of the pious Epilog of the Book of Job says Job is right, his three uncomforting Comforters wrong. So it is important who has said what in the long, long argument between Job and his Comforters, and also in the shorter — Spoiler alert! — theophany at the climax of the poem, when God reveals himself to Job.

            Now even if you're an atheist with a strong background in statistics; even if you're convinced that "on a par with 'Love thy neighbor' and 'All men are created equal,' is the [… great principle of moral advancement] on the bumper sticker: “Shit happens” — even if you're Steven Pinker you might suspect that something highly unusual is happening with Job in the string of disasters he suffers.

            Job's Comforters aren't stupid, but they are conventionally pious and generally conventional: in their time — and at most times in human history — they would believe that Job is operating under a curse; and from this their argument follows.

            They reason that God is great, all-knowing and all-powerful; God is good, and "good" centrally includes just, and merciful. Except for a brief moment when one (Eliphaz) twists the argument toward an indifferent God — "Is it any pleasure to the Almighty if you are righteous / or is it gain to him if you make your ways blameless?" (22.1-3) — they hold the orthodox view that God is active in the world, rewarding and punishing; and Job is suffering. Therefore, God must be punishing Job; and, therefore, Job must have sinned.

            Their job is to get Job to acknowledge his sin and repent and sacrifice and atone and get himself again right with the Lord.

            The Comforters think deductively, and their deduction is logical, but wrong.

            Job thinks inductively, starting with the fact that he hasn't sinned, or at least he hasn't sinned enough to deserve the destruction of his wealth and the murder of his servants and children. And within the Book of Job, that is the case; or more exactly, and to repeat: Job was "a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil" (1.8, [1.1]).

            Job never curses God. The day of his birth — yeah, that's how Job starts his poetic speeches, cursing at some length the day he was born and regretting he wasn't stillborn (3.1-16), but he never curses God; Satan loses that bet. Indeed, I don't think Job ever ceases to love God, which makes all the more painful for him God's betrayal of their relationship (Hosea 2.19 f.).

            Nor in his argument with the Comforters does Job succumb to the second temptation. He will not curse God and die, but neither will he "Agree with God, and be at peace […]" (22.21). Job wants to "speak to the Almighty" and "argue my case with God." He accuses the Comforters of being apologists for God: "As for you, you whitewash with lies," speaking falsely for God and deceitfully pleading the case of the one who is supposed to be the righteous judge (13.1-8). Job claims truth for himself; as long as he lives — significantly put, "as long as my breath is in me, / and the spirit of God is in my nostrils" — he will refuse to lie: "till I die I will not put away my integrity from me. / I hold fast my righteousness, and will not let it go; / my heart does not reproach me for any of my days" (27.1-6).

            Job knows he's blameless and upright and God has been unjust to him, and his vision and compassion expand from his own case to the world generally: "[…] I cry out, 'Violence!'," Job says, but he is "not answered; / I call aloud, but there is no justice" (19.7). Evil people frequently prosper while decent folk die "in bitterness of soul"; as in Ecclesiastes the good and the evil "lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them" (21.7-26). On a larger scale, "From out of the city the dying groan, / and the soul of the wounded cries for help; / yet God pays no attention to their prayer" (24.12).

            So Job fights his way to a radical conclusion and asks a quite literally challenging rhetorical question. "I am blameless; I regard not myself; I loathe my life" — so don't tell me God will strike me dead for what I'm about to say: "It is all one; therefore I say, / he destroys both the blameless and the wicked" (9.21-22). For "[…] if it is not he," God, "who then is it?" (9.24).

            "Could it be — Satan?!", to quote Dana Carvey's Church Lady. Well, no, it couldn't, not ultimately. Not in terms of what was evolving into Jewish theology, and not in terms of what we saw in the Prolog to the Book: Satan is one of the divine beings in the story of Job, one of the sons of God — and Satan does nothing without the express permission of God.

            So Job makes his accusation against God, and Job's wants to hear God's accusation against him. To put together the translations of the Revised Standard Version and the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh of 5746/1985:

      O, that I had someone to give me a hearing:

O, that that the Almighty would reply to my writ,

O, that I had the indictment written by my adversary!

***

I would bind it on me as a crown:

I would give him an account of all my steps;

like a prince I would approach him! (31.35-37)

 Job is confronted with two major temptations: Curse God and die, and Agree with God and be at peace. He resists both. He has a short series of wishes, ending with a call for justice, or at least a trial: with Job on trial and God on trial. Job's claim is his integrity; his boast is that he'd confront God as a prince to a king.

            Job's heroism will be maintained, I'll maintain, if he keeps his integrity, even when confronting God— and when confronted by God.

            As the Book of Job currently stands, there's a long pause here as a new character comes on stage, Elihu son of Barachel, who presents an argument to Job that Job doesn't answer. This is often called "The Elihu Interpolation" and the Oxford editors tell us it's of some theological importance; still, it's a later addition, and I'm going to ignore it.

            'Cause if you ignore Elihu (chs. 32-37), Job calls out God and pronounces an Oath of Clearance for himself (like the Egyptian Book of the Dead) and then "The words of Job are ended" (ch. 31) — and God's begin (chs. 38-42).

            Job gets his trial: "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind" (38.1).

            If William Blake gets the image right, and I'm reading Blake's engraving right, in the theophany in the poem, the Comforters don't see much of anything — they're bowed down — and Job (and his wife in Blake's engraving) see God. Going from there, I'll say that for sure, Job sees God; other onlookers might just see the whirlwind: a tempest; being born in Indiana and raised in Illinois, what I'll see as a tornado. However you picture it, keep that image in mind.

            What God says to Job is "Gird up your loins like a man" — put on that princely jock strap, guy — and "I will question you, and you shall declare to me" (38.3). And God proceeds to berate Job with a series of mostly rhetorical question on the theme, And where were you when?! — with God taking Job on a tour of the ancient cosmos. "Who is this," God forcefully asks Job, "who  darkens counsel, / Speaking without knowledge?" — and starts with the biggie, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? / Tell me if you have understanding" (38.2, 4).

            The upshot of this one-sided trial is that Job repents speaking out of ignorance and ends the poem saying that he despises himself and, as the RSV has it, repents "in dust and ashes" (42.6). And you may justly challenge me with, What kind of hero is this? Where is Job's integrity in backing down?

            My answer would be that Job finally says to God (again combining RSV and Tanakh translation),

I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,

But now my eye sees You;

Therefore I recant and relent

Being but dust and ashes.

I'm going to make much of the "Therefore." Job's integrity is that he speaks from his knowledge and will not deny facts and logic, the sort of facts that Koheleth points out in the Book of Ecclesiastes. His heroism is following through his line of logic and in expanding his circle of concern from himself and family to suffering humankind ‑ and condemning God for that suffering.

            Job keeps heroic integrity if, but only if, in that seeing, the theophany — in God's revealing himself to Job — if in that seeing and hearing Job learns something beyond the fact, in the world of this story, that God is very, very powerful and can get seriously snarky. Job is heroic if he speaks truth to power, ultimate Power, and arguably more heroic if he changes what he says when he gains an altered view of truth.

            One can argue that Job just wimps out, if understandably; and such an argument is made very elegantly by Nickles, the Satan-figure in Archibald MacLeish's fine modernization of Job, his play JB. 

I have faith in Job, and think he retains his integrity, but I won't push the point: theophanies are necessarily "ineffable": you really can't talk about them, nor, when they're over, trust even your memory of them if you're the person seeing God. As a modern scientist might say and the old rabbis did say, "A miracle is no proof": it's outside nature and reproducible experiment or experience; it's the ultimate in personal perception but not really empirical; it's an encounter with the infinite that isn't going to fit into human language or human memory and consciousness.

            We can't talk intelligently or even very intelligibly about Job's experience, so we might do best to shut up.

            But we won't. Or at least I won't, or not for a bit.

            To follow the Job poet's example and repeat yet again, Job was "a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil" (1.8, [1.1]); but Job, I'll fastidiously put it, is not without sin.

            Job is guilty of pride — "pride" is the last word in the RSV rendering of  God's speech to Job — and Job is blameless. Job judges God in the poem, and even in the pious prose Prolog Job puts God within a human system, making sacrifices to God for his children's possible sins, "according to the number of them all" (1.5). God sets the rules; Job obeys the rules; in case his kids don't, Job sacrifices: a kind of double-entry moral accounting, working through a contract — a loving contract, but still a human-style contract — with God.

            Job puts God within a human system, trying to confine the infinite within the finite, which is pride in action and also all the man can do since he is a man. There is an arrogance in thinking we humans can say much intelligent about the material universe; to talk about God is stupid if there is no God, and absurdly arrogant if there is a God.

            The Job poet is heroically arrogant in putting words into the mouth of God. Theophany, the mystic experience of God is ineffable, but this schmuck of a writer is going to try it.

            And he — the poet and God-the-Character — gives us some hints about what this revelation of God by God is revealing.

            Early in his harangue, God asks a question that has as its only answer in the poem the everyday fact — the God part assumed — that God sends "rain on a land where no man is, / on the desert in which there is no man," which may "satisfy the waste and desolate land, and […] make the ground put forth grass" but where it's useless.

            In each of our points of view, we are the center of the universe: that's just part of human perception; look around: the world revolves around me. Expand that a bit — and expanding Job's and our views is central to the poem of Job — expand that a bit, and we see humankind at the center of things. And if you live on a bleeding desert, you will be justifiably pissed off if God sends rain where you can't use it.

            God also talks about the ostrich, who "leaves her eggs to the earth, and lets them be warmed in the ground, / forgetting that a foot may crush them," leaving her, like Job, childless. But she seems undisturbed, "because God has made her forget wisdom, / and given her no share in understanding" (40.13-18). Part of the reason Job suffers as much as he does is that he's a human being and has the intelligence to suffer more than, in losing offspring, an ostrich does.

            Nowadays, we wouldn't let God off the hook so easily, and if you want to argue the intelligent design of nature you have to recognize in that design such horrors as the ichneumon wasp family. Still, as far as we know only humans get all upset over evil and suffering as intellectual problems, and that is because we have reason, which people would come to argue is what makes us made "in the image of God."
            So we have some indication that what Job learns is that things are basically OK in most of the universe outside of human beings.

            God's rant, though rambling, is leading toward an upsetting idea. "In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth," he was, of course, laying the groundwork (literally) for — drum roll here — us. To crown creation, God is going to create us and put us in charge, and let's hear it for — more drum rolls and a fanfare — Adam! Man! Humankind! Us.

            And to prepare the universe for us, the first act of the creator gods, let alone God, is binding the chaos monster(s) because we humans need an orderly world, and orderly by the standards of — drum roll, fanfare, and a hundred-arrow salute (Job's story is set long ago) — us.

            If you're a modern monotheist, believing in, in some sense, creation from nothing (ex nihilo), you should be sensing a problem here. The problem is resolved in this poem, but scarily. God tells Job, "Behold Behemoth, which I made as I made you" and later adds "He is the first of the works [or ways] of God." Now this can just mean that God created the hippopotamus, and you can add to that God's later claiming to control Leviathan, which can just mean a crocodile (41.1 f.). However, Behemoth and Leviathan are two chaos monsters or two names for the chaos monster. If God organized the universe from Chaos, where did Chaos come from? The God of Job claims that "everything under the heavens is Mine" (41.3/11).

            God created Chaos, and chaos, from a human point of view, may be what we see of God: a whirlwind, the tempest — a mindless, overpowering, lethal, city-levelling tornado.

            But Job, for a moment, in the story, sees God within the whirlwind, and hears God out of the whirlwind, and what he learns from this, and what only can be hinted at, makes him change his mind and "therefore […] recant and relent" — and not a moment sooner. Not from hearing pious platitudes from uncomforting Comforters who don't love God enough to argue with God, to wrestle with faith. Not from hearing lectures from conventional sorts who love their neighbor and friend Job so little that they accuse him falsely of deserving his suffering.

            And Job's refusing an unquestioning faith — a comfortable faith — I respect as heroic.

            As does God, assuming the God of the Epilog read the poem. This God says to the Comforter Eliphaz, "I am incensed at you and your two friends, for you have not spoken the truth about Me as did My servant Job" (42.7).

            The "null hypothesis" is always open, and there may be no God. Job is in part a fairy-tale character, from "once upon a time" even when the poem was written. Within the poem, though, Job is a hero — Richard Sewall saw him as a near-archetypal tragic hero — and, among literary characters, where uncomplicated heroism is most likely to be found, Job is my favorite hero.