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. 

Heroes, Hubris, & Honor: Job & Tamburlaine (2 March 2014)

            I am a great admirer of Job of the Biblical Poem of Job: not so much the pious sufferer from the Prolog or the rewarded .000001-Percenter of the Epilog but the wounded lover and tragic hero of the middle of the Book.

            You can complain if you like that Job wimps out in the end, but his final lines to God are

I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees You;
therefore I despise myself,
                and repent in dust and ashes. (42.5-6)

 Not while hearing sanctimonious lies from his "Comforters," not one instant before Job sees God does he repent, and in his repentance he uses that key word of human logic, therefore.

            Job gets the Beatific Vision and sees God in the whirlwind and, within human limitations, sees the real reality of things and, in terms of that expanded vision, repents. Or, if you like, Job sees God as a putz of infinite power and "therefore" wimps out in the face of infinite intimidation.

            Still — if you've ever knuckled under to a spouse or parent or boss or drill instructor or teacher, show some respect for Job standing up as long as he does to the God he's heard about and whose power to fuck over an individual human being he has excruciatingly felt.

            Job holds fast to his integrity, and for that we should admire him greatly.

            Integrity, though, has its limitations.

            The Book of Job is ultimately a kind of divine comedy — Job is restored: happy ending — if a comedy with a significant body count and unhappy endings for Job's extended family. Still, Richard B. Sewell knew what he was doing in using Job's story to begin his study of The Vision of Tragedy and having Job a theological variation on the theme of the tragic hero.

            Tragic heroes frequently have integrity up the whazoo, and moralist drama critics have accused them of Pride as a "tragic flaw."

            Maybe.

            In The Poetics, Aristotle has tragic heroes with hamartia, but that probably means a "tragic," as in really bad, mistake. But in a nicely coherent drama that mistake should flow from the protagonist's character, and that character always and necessarily takes himself or herself — Antigone, Juliet, Cleopatra — very seriously. Tragic characters' integrity, viewed theologically, is the sort of Pride of which God accuses Job: what the Catholic Church calls Superbia, the sin of Satan, numero uno of the Seven Deadly sins and root of all evils: Radix malorum superbia est.

            From a god-like point of view, such Pride is ludicrous, and it doesn't take much to push superbia, the sin that goeth before a fall, and The Fall, into dumb-ass chutzpah: the pride that goeth before a pratfall, falling on your ass, while your friends point and laugh.

            Necessarily, tragic protagonists take themselves and their lives seriously enough to be guilty of hubris: in any realistic view of things, humans are not significant. That's humans, as in our species, to say nothing of any of us individually. To paraphrase the God of Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon (1961): Hey, you weren't here ten million years ago; you won't be here ten million years from now; what's the big deal with your dying now?

            Outside of "The Vision of Tragedy," tragic protagonists are guilty of sinful superbia or comic chutzpah; if the tragedy is working, though, we identify with the tragic protagonist and feel his — usually his — hubris as central to human dignity or self respect, while at the same time keeping our distance and viewing the character somewhat objectively. That is an actor up there on stage, the object of our vision and hearing, plus we know not to identify too much: in most tragedies there's going to be blood on the stage pretty soon — gore brings in the crowds — and a fair amount of that blood will probably come from the protagonist.

            But not always: and one hulking exception leads me into a problem with integrity as demonstrated by the first superstar, superhero of the English Renaissance stage — Ta Da! — Tamburlaine the Great, as depicted by that most excellent of English playwrights ca. 1590, Christopher Marlowe. Or, as the title page of the 1590 printing of Tamburlaine ("Deuided into two Tragicall Di∫cour∫es") put it

Tamburlaine

the Great.

Who, from a Scythian Shephearde,

by his rare and woonderfull Conqueƒts,

became a most puissant and migh-

tye Monarque,

And (for his tyranny, and terrour in

Warre) was tearmed,

The Scourge of God.

Actually, Tamburlaine is only one "Tragicall Discourse," and maybe not even one. Part II is a sequel following the commercial success of Part I, and Part II does end with Tamburlaine's death, so it's sort of "tragical." But just sort of: Tamburlaine dies at the height of his conquests, fairly old for his time and profession (full-time warrior) — and dies very quickly of natural causes. Now it would have been prudent to console Tamburlaine's family with a reference to "their tragic loss," or something like that, but — come on! — his death isn't even all that sad.

            Still, the rule is "kill 'em off or marry them off" and on the Elizabethan stage plays usually moved toward an "exeunt" with a funeral march (tragedy) or pairing off to dance away — sometimes literally — to a wedding (comedy). So Part II is, that, far, tragic: It begins with a funeral and ends with a funeral. Part I, though, is, like the full Book of Job, technically a comedy, in the case of Tamburlaine 1, a romantic comedy, ending with a new and … different world, one more purely noble and promising peace, finally coalescing around a central heterosexual and fertile couple exiting to get married.

            Significant here is that the new world of most comedies is marked as more flexible than the old world: minimally, a romantic comedy is flexible enough to allow one or more formerly "blocked" couples to pair off and marry. Marlowe's Tamburlaine is minutely more flexible at the end of Tamburlaine, Part 1, but only minutely: flexibility isn't in his character; integrity is: being true to himself, true to his sense of honor.

            This is important because Tamburlaine says of himself, in what we might call «the third-person Narcissistic» that, "His honour […] consists in shedding blood / When men presume to manage arms with him" (see 5.2.407-15). Except not just men, and not necessarily armed men. Shortly before this comment on his "honour," we have seen Tamburlaine order the murders of a delegation of girls from the City of Damascus who've come out to plead with him for the city — and then order the massacre of everyone in Damascus, relenting only to spare his near-future father-in-law. And in Part II we will see Tamburlaine's first on-stage, do-it-yourself atrocity in killing his own son, Calyphas, for being AWOL from a battle (Part II, 4.2.36-54).

            Hey, martial law is martial law, and if Tamburlaine's kid could skip a battle, then everyone might skip a battle, except that in the world of Marlowe's Tamburlaine just about every male except Calyphas and a relatively minor ruler is bloodthirsty.

            More important than martial law and tradition, though, is Tamburlaine's honor as integrity and sticking to his rules. If a city submits to him on the first day he and his troops set down before it, he's satisfied "with spoil," and "refuseth blood," i.e., he just robs everybody without killing them. If they hold out to the second day, when he takes the city — and Tamburlaine always wins — "Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood, / Not sparing any that can manage arms"; and if the enemy hold out into the third day, "Without respect of sex, degree, or age, / He razeth all his foes with fire and sword": i.e., he kills every human in town: men, women, and children (end of 4.1).

            Tamburlaine is a test case, or a reduction to the grotesque, of one vision of tragedy, and an important one. In "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949), Arthur Miller says, "In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination."

            The fine Shakespeare scholar Lawrence Lerner once asked if a couple hundred years in the future some author might apply Miller's idea and write a tragedy of Adolf Hitler.

            Marlowe was writing in the 1580s; the historical Timur Lang did his thing 1370-1405, and the historical Timur ranks #9 on Matthew White's "[…] One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in world history, with a body count of some 17 million, putting Timur just behind the Mideast slave trade, 7^th-19^th centuries, but ahead, of the Atlantic slave trade, 1452-1807. In thirty-five years, in a rampage less than two centuries before Marlowe's time, the historical Timur made himself competitive, atrocity-wise, with two of the worst, long-running crimes in human history.

            But Tamburlaine has integrity — at least in Marlowe's version — and follows his idea of honor and pursues a major ideal of honor in his time, and for much of human history: He is, after all "Tamburlaine the Great."

            His most trusted officers beg Tamburlaine not to kill his own son; Tamburlaine kills the kid before our eyes. Tamburlaine declines to rape Zenocrate, the captured daughter of a Sultan, and honorably woos her and pledges himself to her — but he won't go against his customs and spare her city in spite of her pleas. He spares her father, finally, and ends Part I with a promise of peace and fertility, but the incredible climax of that play, not all that long before the conclusion, is the death in battle of Zenocrate's now-former fiancé and the massacre of the inhabitants of Damascus.

            Desiring to teach two works I really like, and perhaps too fond of alliteration, I taught together Tamburlaine and The Terminator (1984) for their examination of focus of purpose and just how we should define heroism and "manly men doing manly things." In Terminator, the ultimate macho-man turns out not to be not a man at all but a machine; Marlowe's Tamburlaine, at least in Part I, starts out and remains — our hero is nothing if not consistent — and increasingly reveals himself as a superman. Tamburlaine whups the asses of, as in kills, all the competing Alpha-, Beta-, and Gamma-males, and, since he's anachronistically a Renaissance superman, he's also a lover.

            The climax of Part I features that Massacre at Damascus, but the slaughter is off-stage. What is on-stage is Tamburlaine's first soliloquy, his "apostrophe" — here, a hymn of praise — to his beloved "divine Zenocrate."

            I used to ask my students what, if anything, they'd use for "noises off" while Tamburlaine was pronouncing his arguably fulsome praise of Zenocrate in what was, unarguably, some of the most impressive poetry in English up to that moment. Some blood-chilling screams from the dying, raped, and/or maimed might undermine Tamburlaine's eloquence here, but the speech doesn't have to be played that way, and it's highly unlikely that it was.

                  Tamburlaine said his "customs are as peremptory / As wrathful planets, death, or destiny" (5.2.64-65). If "A lie is worse than murder," as the Gentleman's Code used to teach, then wouldn't Tamburlaine be right to murder rather than break his word? Including murder every living thing — future father-in-law excepted — in Damascus? Tamburlaine is a modern, complete hero so a fighter and a lover, but in case of a conflict between the two roles — no contest: the implacable fighter wins.

            Tamburlaine Part I was enough of a hit to justify a sequel, as was The Terminator; and it is instructive that it was Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 that went into US pop culture and made Schwarzenegger a star, not Michael Biehn's human, humane, and humanistic Kyle Reese. (Remember Michael Biehn? He's still getting work, and he's rumored to have made good money; Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to marry a Kennedy, become governor of the State of California, and made a shitload of money.) In spite of the obvious intentions of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, T-800 steals the show in The Terminator, and the T-800 "Macho Creed" version of heroism and perversion of integrity is the take-away message from the film for a fair number of viewers, at least those of the seriously-dense, immature male persuasion.

            At least in Part I, I'm sure Christopher Marlowe wants us to admire Tamburlaine, and there is something admirable about the spirit of Tamburlaine in Part II when he defies the god — or God — he thinks is striking him down.

            Tamburlaine is admirable, sort of, in not going gently into death, but he's delusional in thinking his death is some sort of cosmic event. All men are mortal; Tamburlaine is a man — deal with it, "T".

            I am a great admirer of Job and the principle of integrity: of consistency and honesty, being true to oneself and possessing a keen sense of honor. But a lie is not worse than murder; Kyle Reese and (more so) Sarah Connor are the heroes and proper humans of Terminator; and Tamburlaine is a macho asshole on a world-historical scale, but still a macho asshole. In his integrity and honor Tamburlaine can be wondered at, even admired — but admired the way I admire a great white shark. Except that even the shark that rips me apart is innocent and relatively harmless; the Timur Lang of history was phenomenally dangerous and, after his fashion, Marlowe's Tamburlaine is dangerous and, finally, by the end of Part II, ridiculous.


======================
Update (from a post by the BBC):

          Since independence in 1991 Uzbekistan has been restoring the legacy of its great 14th Century conqueror Tamerlane the Great - Amir Timur.
The current Uzbek leadership has eradicated most of the traces of the former Soviet Union's domination.
          Invoking the Timurid spirit in a televised address to the nation earlier this year, President Islam Karimov said: "You are descendants of a great people - you have in your hands the might of Tamerlane".

The Mongolian leadership has been rehabilitating Temujin, "The Great Khan" (1206-27), Timur's model. Matthew White estimates Genghis Khan's body count at 40 million, tying him with Mao Zedong (1949-76) for the second biggest mass slaughter in human history, exceeded only by World War II (66 million). Given the relative populations, Genghis Khan is likely the greatest mass killer in recorded human history, and Tamburlaine the Great competitive for number 2. To repeat a kind of cliché of English Renaissance political thought — you can find it in Shakespeare's Richard II — "Great" is different from "good."