printI got thinking about the Book of Job after I heard La Coulter make fun of Howard Dean for choosing Job as his favorite New Testament reading!
Dean is an unsharpened pencil, but he’s right about Job; it’s unrivaled in Christian Holy Scriptures.
In case you wonder why I’m expounding on a book in the bible, a sidebar is in order: I’ve always thought of myself as a secular person. According to my mother, however, I’m religious. She says a person who is scrupulously just and upright is religious. (She’s biased, of course.)
According to Ann Coulter’s definition, I’m religious too. The definition is on page 266 of her book, Godless, which is the first of her books I’ve read. I bought Treason, because I think the thesis is spot on. The others—liberal this; liberal that —don’t interest me. I don’t regret reading Godless. It’s a lot of fun (the chapter about idiot environmentalists is super. With one exception perhaps (I wonder who?!), I don’t know of anyone who writes this cleverly and amusingly.
In any case, if we apply Coulter’s definition, I’m religious. It is: “Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe we are distinct from the beasts, you’re with God. (Here are my Animals have no Rights essays, which, nevertheless, and contra Coulter, do not defer to a deity in the process of explaining why animals are without rights.)
In any event, I’m of a generation of secular Jews which knows and loves the Hebrew Bible as a tremendous literary, philosophical, and historical achievement. It’s unique. Those who have studied it (in Hebrew, as I have) know the 39 books for the vital, lively (very Jewish), earthy, pioneering, and fascinating works they are. There is nothing stuffy or pompous about the Hebrew Bible, either. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes: “The Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks…
One glance at the Quran and you appreciate even more the power of the Hebrew biblical narrators. (If I were really religious, I’d believe the first five books were written by God, but that’s not what I was taught in a secular Israeli high school—that’s not where the evidence leads).
Back to the Best Book in the Bible: Is there anything in Christian Holy Scripture to rival the Book of Job? (And if there is, we know whence the inspiration came). Considering the period, it’s radical. Here goes:
A very righteous and prosperous man—in Jewish tradition, wealth acquired righteously is a blessing—is put through a succession of trials by God and victimized horribly. His kids are killed, his wealth taken, and he’s inflicted with a skin condition that makes him writhe in itching agony. Yet no matter what God throws at him, he 1) refuses to denounce God. 2) Insists, based on pure fact—and as the ultimate individualist would—that he, Job, is right and God is wrong. What’s more, in the end, God agrees with Job , confessing he was only trying him to see how deep Job’s faith was and how far he could be pushed.
Again, that’s radical. (Such a chapter in the Quran would have ended with a beheading—Job’s stiff neck would have been smitten.)
It’s hard to beat such an unorthodox concept, considering the times. Jews have a tradition of arguing with their God. Abraham haggled for the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah and Jacob physically wrestled with the angel of God.
Still, besides libertarians, who today argues with authority? Nobody—unless that authority happens to be promoting libertarianism, Jeffersonian republicanism, or something that goes against the preordained religion of statism.
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Update: A few readers set out to Christianize Job, in other words to reinterpret Hebrew Scriptures in accordance with Christian constructs and beliefs, alien in Judaism. They did so dogmatically too.
Well, well, scrape away the patina of piety and Christians behave like Muslim Replacement robbers; laying claim to a legacy that is first and foremost so utterly Jewish; written by Jews who, viscerally and intellectually, thought more like me than like any Christian.
Just as Christian thinking is foreign to me; Jewish thinking is manifestly foreign to my interlocutors. They evince no understanding of Judaism. When these particular Christians discuss the Hebrew Bible, they denude it of its Jewish essence and superimpose upon it the Christian articles of faith.
Don’t understand Judaism? Well and good. But just as I don’t lecture you about your scriptures; don’t pontificate about mine or rape them with Christian constructs that are to Judaism as universalism is to Islam.
Furthermore, so long as you can’t read the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew, but rely on some stuffy King James translation, drop the authoritative tone.
Now, my particular animated take on Job—the one that so infuriated Christian literalists— happens to be an extension of my father’s thinking, an orthodox Rabbi and a brilliant scholar of Judaism. Acknowledged as such.
Job, of course, is a philosophical masterpiece. To the literalists who jumped out of their skins at my suggestion God was wrong and that the book all but implicitly concedes the point, let me say this: G-d doesn’t dispute that Job was right in his insistence he did not sin. By logical extension (deduction is something the great JEWISH sages practiced routinely), this would imply G-d was wrong to punish Job. Again: By restoring Job and admitting Job was innocent of all wrongdoing, by default, G-d (G-d of the Jews, that is) admits He was toying with Job.
Again, Job is a deeply Jewish book. Christians (and Reform rabbis) cannot be expected to have a feel for the Hebrew Bible and for Jewish theological thinking, which is very different from Christian thinking.
So how about it? Let’s see less ignorance and more of that Christian humility in your approach to scriptures not your own, about which you know so little.
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Updated Again:
A valued writer on BAB has written in to say, in a nutshell, that the magnificent Jewish bible—all 39 explosive books is nothing but a prelude, a preparation, for the New Testament and Jesus, which Jews regard as a mere prophet.
Yeah, Christians are as chauvinistic as Muslims about reinterpreting, misinterpreting, appropriating, and diminishing this pioneering, and uniquely Jewish text, to say nothing about centuries of experience. As misguided as they are about Jews and their bible, Christians are peaceful and very dear to this writer, so far.
But don’t push it. Positions such as this one, manifestly wrong and off-putting, will have no place on this Jew’s blog.