Of Pranks and Pride and Malicious Mischief (11 Dec. 2012)

             I want to look at a line in the Associated Press's coverage of the December 2012 telephone prank by Australian DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian, a prank that seems to be at least the occasion of the suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who received and forwarded the call: "Whatever pride there had been over" the success of "the hoax was obliterated by worldwide public outrage […]."

            In that sentence, Kristen Gelineau, the author of the AP story, hints at something important.

            In the prank, Greig and Christian impersonated — probably badly — the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and successfully sought information about the condition of the royal granddaughter-in-law, the pregnant Kate Middleton Windsor (so to speak), Duchess of Cambridge, who was hospitalized for acute morning sickness.

            The prank has been called "sophomoric"; Gelineau is more instructive in her use of "pride."

            I'll object to "sophomoric" because college students as well as US high school students go through a sophomore year, and "College is for grownups," or should be, and some maturity should be expected of at least college sophomores.

            "Pride" is more like it because pranks are at the relatively harmless end of practical jokes, and practical jokes pushed far enough get to what's called, significantly, "malicious mischief."

            Shakespeare's tragedy Othello — SPOILER coming up … — ends in a bloodbath (although a restrained one as Jacobean tragedies go), and Greig and Christian, much to the contrary, intended no serious harm. Still, why prank someone at all? Why do people pull practical jokes or go further and do malicious mischief.

            The villain of Othello, the treacherous Iago, speaks about slander, his major method of operation for doing evil in this play. " Good name in man and woman, dear my lord," Iago says to Othello,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.155-61)

Why would someone slander someone else? Why would any do that "which not enriches him" but "makes me poor indeed"?

            Revenge might be one intelligible reason, and Shakespeare's villainous Shylock is easier to understand than Iago: Shylock bears a grudge and tries to exact bloody, as we say, repayment.

            A revenge explanation doesn't work well for Iago: he's third in command under Othello, probably the greatest general in Europe, and he's reached this position at age twenty-eight. Iago may've hit a pewter ceiling, but for a guy who can't do the math required in the (Early) Modern military, he's doing very well, a hell of a lot better than, say, I was doing at age twenty-eight, and probably a whole lot better than you did or will do. However much Iago may feel slighted now and again, he owes Othello, big.

            Now Iago says he thinks Othello has cuckolded him, but that is really, really unlikely to have happened, and Iago doesn't dwell on that accusation. As the great Shakespearean critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it — he wrote some poems, also — as Coleridge put it, Iago's bringing up the idea seems like "the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity."

            Iago, I think, and have taught, is ticked off at subordination — which we good democrats should sympathize with — and has, let's say, issues with love and with ideals that don't fit into his anti-romantic views of the world (with which we should also sympathize). As dramatic characters go, Shakespeare's included, Iago is one twisted puppy and a complicated guy.

            Relevant here, though, is that he's a trickster, or Trickster-figure, with a capital "T": a prankster with a sense of humor who goes way, way, too far. He's an instructive case at the extreme end of a continuum that's starts near those two unlucky, dumb-ass Aussie DJs.

            Iago's mischief is truly malicious: it stems from malice, which in the old Christian psychology is precisely doing evil without any obvious gain.

            So if you want to seriously condemn the call from the merry Australian pranksters, don't call it sophomoric or immature but say that it begins to border on malice.

            And if you follow through on an analysis of malice, you can at least reach to something basic that we can understand, and that Kristen Gelineau points us at: pride.

            Pride may not be the worst of all sins or the source of all evils (Radix malorum Superbia est), but neither is it the virtue we've made it into today.

            We pull pranks to show how clever we are, to have that moment of trivial glory over other people.

            And sometimes the other people feel serious hurt.

            It may be that Jacintha Saldanha death can't, finally, be attributed to the prank phone call. OK, then we could go back to the suicide of Tyler Clementi and note that in addition to whatever hatred of gays was involved — and that could be minimal — there was much glorying in the embarrassing of another human being.

            Iago sings, ironically, "'Tis pride that pulls the country down" (2.3.90), and that, too, is an exaggeration. But pride is a problem when it moves us to mess over other people for kicks; it is a worse problem when we get into the habit of doing so. A habit of mischief is a serious problem when it overcomes empathy and moves us to find serious joy in embarrassing — thereby hurting — others.

            It's rare that practical jokes lead to tragedy; but far too often they lead to more pain than cheap laughs and tackier thrills can justify.

Doing the Right Deed for the Wrong Reason (22 Jan. 2013)

         One of my favorite couplets is from T.S. Eliot's verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, Thomas Becket's crucial insight into his impending martyrdom, "The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed, for the wrong reason."

         For Thomas to seek martyrdom, to choose martyrdom as a personal goal, would be for him — given who he is, given his historical context, given his place in a Christian world — it would be for him a strong spiritual temptation and, for him, the greatest treason.

         In more mundane contexts, though, the "last temptation" idea is pretty much sentimental bullshit.

         I mean the "sentimental" here in an old-fashioned and fairly literal way: "sentimental" as in sentiments, as in having the right ones; "sentimental" in the set of ideas that includes the line, "I don't like your attitude."

         There are places where I respect sentimentality, two anyway, where it's at the core of works that are rigorously, even savagely logical and ethical. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) depends on our visceral rejection of the idea that eating babies — even Irish babies, even babies of poor Irish who are economically worthless — on our revulsion at the image of literally eating babies, as opposed, say, to our complicity in letting them starve. And William Shakespeare's King Lear (ca. 1605) presents a vision of the world, a true vision I think, where ethics and morality start with feeling, start with compassion — including the "visceral" reaction of most people that blinding a helpless old man is wrong. In a universe in which there may be no God or gods, or in which the gods may be bratty little boys torturing humans for sport, in a universe where Nature may be thoroughly "red in tooth and claw" and where social norms go along with the whims of the powerful — in a Machiavellian universe, one starts ethical thinking with feeling; and if such appeals have little philosophical respectability or practical power among the hard-assed, well, that is still where we have to start.

         Most of the time, though, stick to the cliché and extend it: don't do too detailed a dental examine on a free horse, and don't question too hard the deep motives of people doing the right thing.

         Indeed, hypocrisy is widespread and pretty disgusting, but if some politician hypocritically and cynically pushes a program in the public interest, just say "Thank you" and stay alert. Hypocrisy is "on the one hand"; on the other hand is the simple fact that human motivation is complex, even for saints less problematic than Thomas Becket, St. Thomas of Canterbury.  (Thomas died opposing the principle of one law for all people in a country and in other ways defending the privileges of an overprivileged Church. His causes weren't so good; his integrity was and remains admirable.)

         In a climactic trial scene in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s first novel, Player Piano (1952), the protagonist is most seriously accused of fomenting revolution, with the most damning part of the accusation that his motive was to get back at his father. Similar accusations were repeated against radicals in the 1960s: our rebellion was based in our psyches, adolescent rebellion against authority taken to the streets.

         Part of the lesson of Player Piano and of the debates of the 1960s is, "So what?" In Player Piano, the revolution was doomed but justified and necessary. That's what counts, not the motives of its titular leader. Similarly of the Movements of the long 1960s: were the political analyses, on balance, right or wrong? Were the various causes generally just? If Civil Rights and ending the Vietnam War were just stupid goals, okay, then one might get curious about what sort of psychopathologies or arrested developments got people thinking such weird thoughts, and acting on them. If the political analyses were at least arguable, then argue about them. If the causes might have been just, argue the issues and how they might have been pursued better at the time and perhaps still better today.

         What's going on in people's "hearts and minds" — brains and hormone systems or whatever — isn't easily knowable and generally no one's business except those people and their families and close friends.

         If you don't like someone's attitude, say so, and then move the conversation on or move on yourself. If people are doing the right thing, you've definitely got the right to try to determine if they will continue to do so. But on social issues that's a political analysis, where people's sentiments and attitudes are usually less important than their situations.

         If you don't trust someone's motives for doing "the right deed," try to make sure that the pressures on him are such that he'll continuing doing so; in terms of his soul, those pressures may be "the wrong reason," but his soul isn’t your business. 

Abortion Rant, Early Summer 2013 (30 June 2013)

            All right, class; let us review one more time.

            To My Liberal Allies: We are humanitarians. Conservatives are supposed to join us in humanitarian concerns, opposing me-first individualism and stressing people's connections with society and the world, but they haven't been too good at that for the last century and a half or so, so it's up to us. So, liberals, listen up.

            In The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), Steven Pinker usefully reminds us of key points by the two rather different philosophers, Peter Singer and Jeremy Bentham. Pinker tells us that in The Expanding Circle, Singer argues "that over the course of history, people have enlarged the range of beings whose interests they value as their own" (Angels 175) — and liberals should see this trend as a very good thing and work to reinforce that expanded circle and, in places, expand it further. In 1789, Bentham clarified a crucial point for, if not animal rights, at least human responsibility regarding sentient life: "The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" (Angels 148).

            So, liberals: Given that we humans do privilege humans, and probably should, we want a broad, and, ahem, liberal definition of "human." Given the often-horrible history of people restricting "human" to "people like us," we need to resist strongly the habit of exclusion. Mel Brooks's 2000-Year-Old Man is a serious nut job, and the seriousness includes his rendition of The First National Anthem as "Let 'em all go to hell / Except Cave 76!" And we have a humanitarian duty to protect as much as possible all sentient creatures from unnecessary suffering.

            Okay?

            That does not mean that we back down on abortion rights, but it does mean that we recognize that some place in a pregnancy we get a being close enough to human to deserve some of the rights of human personhood, and that some place in a pregnancy we get a being that may be capable of suffering and deserves protection from unnecessary suffering.

            Some place during a woman's pregnancy, she carries a being we should include in "the expanding circle" and whose concerns deserve attention along with those of the mother.

            There are practical implications there, which I will get to in my turn to conservatives.

            To Conservatives Who've Gotten This Far: A consistent liberal position would be that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare, and as early in the pregnancy as possible. In your resistance to abortion, you're moving it intentionally toward illegal but also — I hope inadvertently — also toward less safe and later in the period of gestation. There is indeed "always a death in an abortion," and you're moving that which gets killed closer to a human person, closer to a sentient being capable of suffering in that death. And some of you folk, in resisting birth control, are making abortion less rare.

            Now I assume most readers know enough biology and theology to know that "Life begins at conception" is just a stupid statement: yet again, life doesn't begin; it began. According to the Book of Genesis, it began not long after God created the heavens and the earth a good deal back: Happy new year 5773 for the Jewish count; Christians have the world a bit older, so let's round off to 6000 years. The scientific estimate we can round off to 3.5 billion years — and it doesn't matter; it's past tense "life began" and a long time ago. So since most people aren't stupid, what they mean is "Human life begins with a human conception" and you're defining "human" essentially (and I mean "essentially" in terms of essence here) as a human soul.

            If you have ensoulment at the moment of conception, you have a human life in a zygote, embryo, or fetus, and killing it is murder, and, in some theories, worse than murder. In some theories, that little human — even when microscopic — is not only an unborn baby but also an unbaptized baby. And the fate of unbaptized babes? That once-famous Puritan minister and poet, Michael Wigglesworth, has God address dead infants, who "never had or good or bad / Effected personally," but still inherited Original Sin (Day of Doom, lines 233-40, 354-57).

               A crime it is, therefore in bliss

               You may not hope to dwell

               But unto you I shall allow

               The easiest room in hell.”

        Alternatively, one may argue that unbaptized infants (fetuses, embryos) are unsaved because they had no chance not just to be born but to be reborn, in Christ. One may argue, and the Anabaptists and Baptists do argue, that infant baptism won't bring salvation, but only baptism for professing believers who have been saved by the irresistible grace of God. The upshot on abortion can be the same whatever one believes about baptism, but readers whose eyes are glazing over about now may be on to an important point here.

            American culture is, indeed, largely a product of Christendom. I'm a Jewish American, and I'm reminded of American Christianity every time I deal with, say, the Battle of Marathon, 490 years BC: Before Christ; or the Battle of Agincourt in that Year of the/our Lord (Anno Domini) 1415. After much ado and with much inconsistency, we Americans have decided, though, mostly, to separate that Christian-inflected culture from State decisions. A strong reason for doing so is that when Church and State got together in the early modern period, one of the first things they did was burn at the stake Anabaptists or early Baptists or anyone else sending infant souls to Hell by discouraging infant baptism.

            There are coherent and elegant arguments to be made against abortion and against contraception and against any form of sex that doesn't lead to reproduction. But nowadays those are religious arguments: after some time in the 20^th century, when the human population hit three billion — and certainly nowadays at seven billion and counting — secular arguments in favor of "Be fruitful and multiply" lost their power. Hell, from a religious point of view it's been maybe the one commandment human beings generally have fulfilled. And applying religious rules gets really dangerous in a country not only into sex but with almost equal enthusiasm into sects.

            Social conservatives can talk about our being "a Christian nation" or even "a Judeo-Christian nation" or someday maybe even "an Abrahamic nation" and bring in Islam; but they can do so only if they don't get into the bloody — and historically it's been very bloody — details of which Christianity (etc.).

            And liberals, here's where I need your attention again, especially liberals with an interest in religion.

            If there's wide appeal for making abortion safe, legal, early, and rare, the question is what the objections to that would be, and the major one as a practical political matter is that the means to that goal go against the law of God. Offering contraception and back-up abortion is going to tempt people to sin, and that is really bad: In the Eden story, God is more pissed off at the tempting Serpent than with Adam and Eve.

            There are secular arguments to be made against encouraging nonmarital sex, but those are answerable by pointing to European places doing quite nicely with readily-available contraception and relaxed attitudes toward sex as recreation. Indeed, sex can be dangerous, but anything worth doing is worth taking some risks to do, and sex — secularly viewed, taking commonsense precautions — is usually safer than sky-diving or skiing.

            The key arguments against contraception and nonreproductive sex are religious, and I think liberals (et al.) need to confront the issue directly. Try this: any God who would damn unbaptized babies, any God who would send kids to Hell for masturbation or anal intercourse or fornication or giving or receiving fellatio — isn't worthy of worship.

            So, if you've gotten this far, let us get specific on what is to be done. I say the ethical imperative now in the USA is abortion clinics numerous enough and handy enough for early abortions, and strong social action to make abortion acceptable only in an emergency. That implies "Plan B" availability, preventing that "emergency." An effective program also means coming down hard on US and international pharmaceutical firms to work on contraception for men and, simultaneously, for now, putting strong pressure on men and boys to use condoms.

            Such popular culture staples as pornography can be of use here, but more important might be the law. Whether or not to remain pregnant after discovering a pregnancy is the decision of the girl or woman. DNA testing can be used to identify fathers, and fathers can be — and shall be if this argument succeeds — compelled to help pay to raise their offspring, by their indentured labor if they can't find a job. So it's a man's right and duty to control his reproduction, which for now means vasectomy or, if you don't want the responsibilities of fatherhood but do want the option later on — then for now use a condom. (And, of course, more frequent condom use is also a good idea for public health)


            So, liberals: Understand that conservatives have legitimate concerns here and that religious people have the most serious of concerns — issues of salvation. Realize that conservatives have legitimate complaints about the coarsening of our culture through, centrally, oversexualization, exhibitionism, and plain tackiness. Liberals and conservatives: Work to make all abortions after the first trimester very rare and a serious medical matter. And conservatives, sorry, but that means you're going to just let some of us go to hell — although you can insist, and occasionally enforce by law, that we do so with minimal annoyance to the neighbors. 

My Favorite Anti-Hero: Jonah (25 July 2013)

         My favorite anti-hero is Jonah, "the son of Amittai," the title character in the one comic book in the Bible. Now, in its full-scale historical sweep, the Christian Bible is a "Divine Comedy" of a rather bloody sort: the tragedy of The Fall of Man leading through an eventful but largely sad and violent history of humankind to the Incarnation and Sacrifice by torture of the Son of God, then moving on the rebirth of the Resurrection and then, for a conclusion, "a new and better world coalescing around a central couple" of Christ in glory, and the saved — the Church, the Bride of Christ — at the end of The Book of Revelation. 

  But looking at the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is getting technical, and technical in the fairly limited sense of Rich Erlich's correcting Northrop Frye's chemical imagery in talking about the conclusion of a comedy (in Anatomy of Criticism, 1954). So I'm using a technical usage of comedy with the Christian Bible and one I've applied to a pretty vast narrative arc — covering human history, as Bible Christians see it — and getting me into dangerous territory: the prejudice against comedy is sufficient that many English-speakers habitually contrast "comic" with "serious," as if you can't have serious comedy; and a fair number of Christians get pissed off if you tell them they have a comic religion. Many of them were taught in school that Dante Alighieri ca. 1302 called his major work La Commédia, with the Divina added later, but that doesn't stop them from seeing "comic" as a put-down.

            The opinions of at least one of my scholarly betters notwithstanding — Rabbi Ken Ehrlich, the former Dean of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati sees the Book of Jonah as tragic; that expert opinion respectfully noted, I'll stick with the reading of Jonah as comic. The book starts in alienation, with the great City of Nineveh all sinful and (therefore) separated from God, and ends in reconciliation and integration, with a reformed Nineveh reconciled to God. And along the way Jonah converts a boatload of sailors and he himself goes from misery in the depths to release and freedom and pulling off the greatest Prophetic success of all time in saving Nineveh.

            (That "depths" part is literal. Jonah isn't swallowed by a whale but by a "huge fish." Whales are air-breathing mammals and have to surface; fish don't. That fish goes to the bottom and stays there until Jonah at least mouths the proper formulas about the lesson in mercy that God is going to pretty great lengths to teach him.)

            Anyway, the Book of Jonah has a classic comic happy ending, just not for Jonah, in Jonah's view of things. Jonah is kind of dense, the object of a satire.

            And in addition to his Book's propagandizing for a universalist view of a merciful God (with a sense of humor), that's what I like about Jonah, that he's such a nebbish — and a bit of an alazon and, in a useful word that has not gone into scholarly vocabulary, a putz.

            Jonah is a nebbish as an unholy fool, and he's the alazon of a festive comedy: the curmudgeon who excludes himself from the celebrations at the end of a comedy, like Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or Shylock in a simplistic reading of The Merchant of Venice.

            In the synagog, Jonah's story caps the High Holidays: it's the last reading from Scriptures, on the afternoon on Yom Kippur: it's the stressed book in synagog liturgy, elevated even beyond the great respect it holds among Christians.

            Anyway, Jonah is up there with the biggies of the tradition. His story ends a Days of Awe cycle that begins with God's remembering Sarah in her old age and giving her and Abraham a son, Isaac: thus giving the Jewish version of how the Arabs are blood relatives to Jews, but we get the better land (Genesis 21). The story of Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael is followed by The Binding of Isaac, with Abraham's reaching out his hand to slay his son, his favorite son, whom he truly loves: either the act of a murderous fanatic or (if Søren Kierkegaard is right), the leap into the absurd of a Knight of Faith. However you see Abraham here, he's a big-time figure, as are the others in the High Holy Day readings: Hannah and the great prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, and recounting the Day of Atonement ceremony of the High Priest, plus a major Martyrology from the Roman persecutions.

            "Heavy matters! Heavy matters!", as a Shakespeare character says in a very different tragi-comic context.

            And then Jonah shuffles in.

            The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and in the standard summons to prophecy commands him to go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against it. And Jonah immediately sets forth — hauling ass in more or less in the opposite direction to Tarshish, which was probably near the Straits of Gibraltar: in any event, in the opposite direction to pretty much the end of the earth.

            Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrians, the enemy city for a while, and Jonah wants nothing to do with it: a Hebrew prophet may be without honor in his own country, but he's dead meat in a place like Nineveh. Worst that can happen, the Ninevites kill him, horribly; second worst: by some miracle his mission is successful and the goddamn Ninevites don't get the destruction they deserve.

            So Jonah runs away, and we get the storm at sea and Jonah going down and sleeping in the figurative bowels of the ship, a womb with no view, so to speak. The brave pagan sailors try to save the ship — throwing off cargo and calling to their gods — but the Lord keeps the storm raging and they throw lots to determine the cause and, of course, "the lot fell upon Jonah" (1.7).

            To a degree hard to believe nowadays, the ancients believed in divination and omens and portents and all; more important, Jonah is a story, and it's rare in a well-made story that you'd get a divination scene like this where the lot falls wrong, unless, of course, that's the point of the story.

            In any event, the bones or dice or straw-pulling or whatever points out Jonah, and the sailors throw questions at him trying to find out who he is, all of which he answers with " I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land," which is kind of a strange answer. As a student of mine elegantly if flippantly put it, for all Jonah's use of orthodox and cliché answers about Yahweh as planetary Creator and Ruler, Jonah acts as if God were "back in Jerusalem, in a box in the Temple" (1.1-10).

            The sailors try to save the boat, but the storm gets worse, and Jonah tells them to throw him overboard: Jonah has a thing about giving up. The sailors decline to sacrifice Jonah; but when the storm gets still worse they very reluctantly "took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows" (1.13-16). Note the spelling there: Lord, as in "Adonai," as in the traditional replacement for Yahweh: the sailors, at least for now, have given up their gods and gone over to Jonah's.

            From Jonah's point of view, his trip toward Tarshish has been a disaster: going from bad to awful, and leading to his isolation from human society and a symbolic death. From the point of view of God, angels, and people listening to the story, though, this is typically cruel comedy, but with a touch of pathos as Jonah sinks into the sea.

            But then — ta-dum! — comes the most famous part of the story, for "[…] the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights" (1.17)— an important point in the Christian reading of Scripture, prefiguring (in this reading) the death, burial, and resurrection of the Christ, and maybe "the Harrowing of Hell," which is a neat bit of doctrine — and must have made a great Medieval mystery play — if no longer fashionable.

            A prefiguration of the Christ or not, in Jonah's story we definitely have The Descent of the Hero, twice over. Going into The Belly of the Beast is a substitute for descent into the Underworld; and, in Jonah's experience, that great fish dives and dives deep (2.1 f.). From Odysseus in The Odyssey to Christ in The Descent of Christ into Hell and The Apostles' Creed to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back to Ellen Ripley in Aliens, heroes and (of late) heras have descended; and Jonah descends, if not exactly in a heroic exercise of choice.

             Jonah combines images nicely — we're in a poetic section of the Book — and says that from the belly of the fish and "from the belly of hell," or Sheol, he cried out, and "When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple" (2.7). Okay, he's learning: Yahweh the cultic deity may be back in that box in the Temple — in and around the Ark in the Holy of Holies — but God is, pretty obviously to the audience, also the God Jonah told the sailors he worshiped, the creator of sea and land, and firmly in charge of sea, sky, storms, and the occasional really big fish. And if that is the case?

            If that is the case, the Lord God might well also be the God of the Ninevites, and the Revised Standard Version translates the difficult next verse of the Hebrew with the strongly universalist, "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their true loyalty." And a couple lines later God "spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land" (2.10).

            And here I need to pay a debt to a literalist, Fundamentalist, propagandizer for hearing the Word — and a guy who taught this literary critic and eventual film critic a crucial lesson about seeing a text.

            A couple students invited me in to teach Jonah (and later Ecclesiastes) to their BASIC group: "Brothers and Sisters in Christ," associated with the local Campus Crusade for Christ. Their minister wasn't about to let a non-Christian infidel such as I in with his flock so he stayed and — the Spirit coming upon him — kind of broke into my shtick here at Jonah's, let's say, landfall, and described in detail what someone would look like if he'd just been puked up after three days in the guts of some humongous fish.

            I was about to jump to the second part of the story and the story's theological and philosophical significance as a mashal, here, a parable and satire. But in the world of the story there is that moment when Jonah was vomited up, and on theological, philosophical, moral, and LitCrit grounds the minister was right: we owe Jonah a look.

            The dude just had one really rotten experience, and part of the genius of the story is the balance between what should be our sympathy for Jonah from a human point of view balanced by an objective view of this poor dumb schmuck from a god-like, audience point of view. (Authors and audiences are to fictional characters as God is to humans: potentially omniscient, e.g., in reading characters' thoughts, omnipotent in being able to, say, move them faster than the speed of light.)

            So look down on Jonah standing there getting the call for the second time, "Arise, go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it what I tell you" (3.2). And Jonah trudges off dripping slime and arrives at Nineveh and walks a third of the way into the city — it's a three-days walk across, that's how big Nineveh is — and speaks his oracle to the Ninevites: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." And that is it: "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown" — the collected prophecies of Jonah. You don't have to believe the Prophets or like them (here and there they say some awful things), but the major Prophets did know their poetry. Jeremiah on exile, imaged as a resurrected Rachel wordlessly mourning: "A cry is heard in Ramah — / Wailing, bitter weeping — Rachel weeping for her children" (31.15). Isaiah on proper repentance: "To loose the fetters of wickedness, / To undo the bands of the yoke, / And to let the oppressed go free" (58.6). Even by much lower standards, Jonah's line is really lame.

            Maybe the idea here is like a bit in Paddy Chayefsky's play, Gideon, where the Lord intentionally chooses a loser like Gideon for a general and intentionally commands him to use battle tactics even Gideon knows are stupid; God wants everyone to be very sure that if the Hebrews won, it had to be a miracle, literally a miracle.

            And, oh, there is a kind of miracle at Nineveh. One line from Jonah, and the Ninevites repent, from the king and his nobles all the way down the Assyrian social hierarchy. Sackcloth, fasting, sitting in ashes, tears, turning away from evil — the whole moral conversion, repentance routine. "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not" (3.5-10).

            Yay! The greatest prophetic triumph in the Bible. And Jonah's reaction? "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil" (4:2).

            Now the Jewish tradition of story-telling from The Binding of Isaac story to Stanley Kubrick's version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is to just hit the high points, so maybe the Narrator here just left out Jonah's saying back in Judah what he says here he said; or Jonah's lying to God. For sure, Jonah repeats here a very important cultic creed. In Exodus 34.6, at Sinai in the renewal of the Covenant, the Lord "descended in a cloud and stood there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him [Moses] and proclaimed 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin […]'" — with the ellipsis marking the "but" part often stressed in arguments for an Old Testament God of Judgment: that God will punish the guilty unto the third and fourth generation. (And if the Revelation to John gets it right, a New Testament God who will punish the wicked forever.) Jonah, though, quotes only the part on grace, mercy, and kindness. He knows the cultic line but even now he doesn't really believe it. Or, he believes and doesn't approve: not if mercy extends to Assyria and the Ninevites.

            If I were scripting this moment as a shot in film, I'd put a "beat" here, a pause in which God's answer to Job's little outburst is silence. Jonah continues, with a word from logic: "therefore." "Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live" (4.3) Again with the giving up! Identifying with Jonah, we'd find this very sad; looking down on him as a satiric anti-hero, it's just pathetic, and there's much to be said for God's answering question — hey, it's a Jewish God; He's going to answer your question with questions — God answers with the rhetorical question, "Doest thou do well to be angry?" or, "Are you that deeply grieved?" (4.4).

            Jonah doesn't answer but cuts out and sits, we are told explicitly "on the east side of the city" and makes a booth there "and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city." My Bible-as-Lit teacher, Lloyd E. Berry, noted that back in mythic times, city-killing fire and brimstone come out of the east, so maybe Jonah sits on the east side just in case God overshoots. In Berry's (comic) reading — I'm not saying anything original here — Jonah still has hope that God will destroy Nineveh and the Ninevites (4.4). Then God prepares a gourd, or some sort of plant (the God of the Universe does plants as well as storms and fish) and has it grow over Jonah as a kind of umbrella, for which Jonah, gracious for once, is grateful (4.6).

            So then God comes up with a worm that kills the plant, arguably carrying micro-management of the cosmos to an extreme, but moving toward teaching Jonah a lesson, and the world a lesson about what Jonah represents. "And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.'" Again we see God doing weather and Jonah doing despair, and parody. Jonah under the plant, after the greatest prophetic feat in history, despairs. Elijah, having defeated and, by our standards, murdered, the priests of Baal, is pursued by the forces of Queen Jezebel, finally (about 130 miles later) ending up under a broom tree. "Enough!" Elijah cries out. "Now, O Lord, take my life […]" (1 Kings 19.1-4). It's not great parody, but it's a nice little touch for those who know First Kings: Jonah is no Elijah.

            "And God said to Jonah, 'Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?' And Jonah said, 'I do well to be angry, even unto death.' Then said the Lord, 'Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more then six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" (4.9-11).

            Ken Ehrlich declined to read "and also much cattle" at a service, but the annotators in Tanakh — a fairly recent Jewish translation (5746, 1985 C.E.) — and in the Oxford Revised Standard Version (1962), call attention to it.

            The Tanakh editors note that "Infants and beasts are not held responsible for their actions." The Oxford editors say, "The point of the book is that God loves every creature in his universe, even the cattle."

            I used to follow that assertion by the Oxford editors by asking my class "What do you see as 'The point of the book'?" and add, "It should have one." Jonah "is read in the Church as part of Holy Week," and, again, it has a place of high honor in the Synagog. "If the Book of Jonah is a mashal in the sense of 'satire,' what's being satirized? If Jonah is the butt — target —what does Jonah represent?"

            To help my students answer that question I added, in the manner of a Jewish God or parent — or fairly typical teacher — more questions, starting with, Is it wrong to look forward to the Day of the Lord as the day the Ninevites get it, when all your enemies get it? How about the enemies of God? John tells us in The Book of Revelation, climaxing the Christian Bible: "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death" (21.8) — is it OK to want them not just to die horribly but to die "the second death"? Or, if that's a matter of Divine Justice, how about getting back to the Assyrians and how one should feel about conquerors? Should you forgive foreign oppressors who have killed your children? Or try to repay them "in kind"?

                             Fair Babylon, you predator,
                             a blessing on him who repays you in kind
                             what you have inflicted on us;
                             a blessing on him who seizes your babies
                             and dashes them against the rocks! (Psalm 137.8)

Jonah is the anti-hero of a Divine Comedy that is also a profound satire. Jonah is nobody special (as prophets go), the average human being as Hebrew, a "synecdoche" for Israel: God's chosen who should be bearer of the Word of mercy and grace, a light to the world. Instead Jonah is a run-of-the-mill believer, whose values are tribal and just starting to move into nationalism, a guy (or gal) who mouths formulas that are the product of a logic he really won't follow: One God, one Loving Parent, one humankind, — and therefore those bloody Assyrian (or whatever) pig fellators are our kin. Even the Assyrians might have a call on God's mercy and can demand our compassion: inclusion within the circle of humanity The Book of Jonah makes some serious satiric demands on us, calling us to high ethics and a kind of nobility.

            Unlike Jonah, whom we should find so laughable.


            So the competition is tough, but as anti-heroes go, Jonah is my favorite. 

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.