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The Book of Job: A Biography
The Book of Job raises stark questions about the nature and meaning of innocent suffering and the relationship of the human to the divine, yet it is also one of the Bible's most obscure and paradoxical books, one that defies interpretation even today. Mark Larrimore provides a panoramic history of this remarkable book, traversing centuries and traditions to examine how Job's trials and his challenge to God have been used and understood in diverse contexts, from commentary and liturgy to philosophy and art.
Larrimore traces Job's obscure origins and his reception and use in the Midrash, burial liturgies, and folklore, and by figures such as Gregory the Great, Maimonides, John Calvin, Immanuel Kant, William Blake, Margarete Susman, and Elie Wiesel. He chronicles the many ways the Book of Job's interpreters have linked it to other biblical texts; to legends, allegory, and negative and positive theologies; as well as to their own individual and collective experiences. Larrimore revives old questions and provides illuminating new contexts for contemporary ones. Was Job a Jew or a gentile? Was his story history or fable? What is meant by the "patience of Job," and does Job exhibit it? Why does God speak yet not engage Job's questions?
Offering rare insights into this iconic and enduring book, Larrimore reveals how Job has come to be viewed as the Bible's answer to the problem of evil and the perennial question of why a God who supposedly loves justice permits bad things to happen to good people.
Larrimore traces Job's obscure origins and his reception and use in the Midrash, burial liturgies, and folklore, and by figures such as Gregory the Great, Maimonides, John Calvin, Immanuel Kant, William Blake, Margarete Susman, and Elie Wiesel. He chronicles the many ways the Book of Job's interpreters have linked it to other biblical texts; to legends, allegory, and negative and positive theologies; as well as to their own individual and collective experiences. Larrimore revives old questions and provides illuminating new contexts for contemporary ones. Was Job a Jew or a gentile? Was his story history or fable? What is meant by the "patience of Job," and does Job exhibit it? Why does God speak yet not engage Job's questions?
Offering rare insights into this iconic and enduring book, Larrimore reveals how Job has come to be viewed as the Bible's answer to the problem of evil and the perennial question of why a God who supposedly loves justice permits bad things to happen to good people.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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August 8, 2025
This is one to make you think. Think about good and evil, human suffering, and the relationship between God and humanity.
Larrimore’s book combines history with commentary. It’s a history of the Book of Job itself, including an account of differences in the telling of the story both before and after the biblical text we now have. And it’s a history of what writers and thinkers like Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Leibniz, Voltaire and others on up through Elie Wiesel have said by way of interpreting and attempting to resolve the story. And Larrimore contributes his own analyses as well.
The dominant theme is theodicy, or the problem of evil as exemplified in Job’s plight (and his reward). But other questions are raised as well, including Job’s own status as Jew or Gentile, the Christian vs. Judaic interpretations of the story, the possible foreshadowing or even prophecy of Jesus’s suffering, and the moral in terms of what a proper relationship to God is. I’ll talk mainly about theodicy-related themes.
A simple and conventional reading of the story, as a parable with a moral, releases us from much that makes the story interesting and puzzling. God allows Satan to test Job’s faith through suffering, first at the loss of his children and his wealth, and then at the loss of his health and dignity. Job’s faith is tested, but he persists in faith and God rewards him for it in the end. His wealth is doubled and his family restored.
At that we can resolve the story and pack it up as a story of faith tested, proven, and rewarded.
But that leaves out the tensions, the questions, the seeming paradoxes that make the story something we can’t just pack up and store away. Larrimore’s treatment allows us to dwell with the story, puzzle with it, and wonder about it.
The big question is the question of theodicy: how can we reconcile God’s beneficence and omnipotence with the persistence of evil in the world?
The frame story of the Book of Job is a challenge brought to God by Satan. Actually, Larrimore points out that the word here (“hassatan”) that we standardly translate as the proper name “Satan” is actually a term for an “adversary” such as a prosecuting attorney. He often refers to this role as “the satan” rather than as the specific character “Satan.”
God presents Job to Satan as a “perfect” and “upright” man. Satan dares God to allow him to take away Job’s wealth and everything that he has, saying to God that Job “will curse thee to thy face.” Satan’s reasoning is that Job, a man of wealth and good fortune, has no reason to oppose or resist God. Take those things away, and see what happens.
God allows Satan to do exactly that, first taking away Job’s wealth and causing the deaths of his children, and then taking his health and dignity.
Job doesn’t appear to deserve the sufferings that God allows Satan to inflict. He is, in God’s own words, “perfect.” Job himself doesn’t think he deserves his suffering. He does not curse God as Satam predicted, but he “cursed his day” and asked, “Let the day perish wherein I was born.” He complains of God’s treatment and wishes he could plead his case so that God would relent, as if God were behaving unjustly and needs only to be shown his error.
Why does God permit Job’s suffering? Although God is not inflicting the punishments, he is explicitly permitting Satan to do so. God could simply forbid it. He is omnipotent and beneficent, so why does he permit Job to suffer?
Maybe the obvious answer is that God is answering Satan’s challenge. You could argue that Job’s suffering is justified by the need for God to answer Satan’s challenge, that, in some sense (moral or otherwise), answering Satan’s challenge is more important or valuable or significant than the apparent injustice done to Job. Job is collateral damage.
And you could argue, as reflected in Job’s friends’ speeches, that Job is a sinner like all humans. Know it or not, Job has sinned. He is suffering justifiably, and he should repent sins that he must have committed but doesn’t know he has committed.
Or you could argue that Job’s sense, and our sense of justice and injustice, is distinct from God’s, that in fact Job’s suffering is justified in God’s sense of justice, a sense we do not and could not possibly understand.
As I read Larrimore’s commentary, the approach I’m drawn to is to take the starting point of the story as definitive — the interaction between God and Satan. What is at stake in the story is what is at stake there — the strength of humanity’s relationship to God. The story of Job’s suffering is in service to that, not a matter of ultimate worth in itself. Job’s suffering is playing a part in the story, and the test, that really matters. That Job’s suffering can’t be justified is insignificant in the light of this larger stake.
But this creates an apparent schism between what matters to God and what matters to secular man. This is somewhat suggested by Aquinas’ interpretation of the story, as it’s reported by Larrimore.
That interpretation expands the separation between God and man, that the purposes of God and the welfare of a man so “perfect” and “upright” could be so far apart. Yes, Job gets his wealth back in the end, and he gets a new family. But his children have perished, and he has undergone the suffering that he has undergone — those things are permanent, devastating, and real.
A similar idea is developed by John Calvin, in his notion of “double justice.” When Job (and we) complain of Job’s suffering, we do so from the standpoint of justice in this world, not divine justice. Were we to try to adopt the God’s-eye-view, what would matter is the quality of creation, not the quality of individuals’ lives.
But that’s a dangerous way to think. It reduces the significance of good and evil in this world, allowing that something, an act that serves God’s purposes, could conflict with and override our (worldly) sense of right and wrong.
There are instances, in the Bible itself, where obedience to God suspends the ethical, in Kierkegaard’s terms. And in doing so, it opens the door to worldly injustice in the name of God. Just as Abraham, the story Kierkegaard is inspired by, agrees to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham is answering a higher call than worldly justice, and he must turn his back on his duty as a father in this world.
Moreover as Calvin says, none of us understands that higher, divine justice. We can’t act in its name (unless directed to do so by God, as Abraham, we are told, is). If we, supposing to understand God’s justice, were to use faith as a weapon against worldly justice we would commit an offense of the same arrogant sort as Job’s (and his friends’) presumption to understand God’s wisdom and a divine sense of justice.
This all leaves us in a precarious position. There is a higher calling, we don’t understand it, and it can suspend, even violate our own sense of right and wrong.
What we’ve done with this approach is push God and humanity far apart from one another. Luther wrote, “God so orders this corporeal world in its external affairs that if you respect and follow the judgement of human reason, you are bound to say either that there is no God or that God is unjust.” Human reason fails. And following faith, even or especially when based in a reading of scripture, is fraught, as Luther and others famously pointed out.
If we go back again to the framing story, we’ll find that the proper relationship between God and man seems to reflect this sense of distance. That relationship, as God says, in his speech at the end of the story, is one of “fear for the Lord.” While the conventional, relatively simple understanding of the story depicts a parable of a test of faith, faith per se doesn’t appear really to be the issue. It isn’t Job’s faith that Satan proposes to test, it is Job’s “fear of God.” And when in Job 28/28, when God speaks of the proper relationship of humankind to God, he says, “Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”
In fact, the word “faith” doesn’t appear in the text of the Book of Job at all (at least in the King James Version). While the Hebrew word translated as “fear” (yirah) appears to be nuanced, it is not translated as “faith” but more often as “fear” or “awe”, both suggesting difference and distance.
In later chapters, Larrimore moves ahead to Elie Wiesel’s and others’ interpretations of the story of Job in the light of the holocaust. Wiesel’s struggles to come to terms with the story are especially poignant. He asks the question he has to ask, why would God stand by and not intervene in the plight of the Jewish people during the holocaust? As a survivor of Auschwitz, for Wiesel, that’s not an abstract, intellectual question. It’s real and present. And he can’t be satisfied with glib answers. It doesn’t look as if Wiesel ever did resolve the question to his own satisfaction.
Larrimore cites other readings of Job, including some interesting hints of an experiential reading, one that doesn’t so much present the story as something to understand as something to experience in a more dramatic sense. There the story has an experiential, spiritual effect rather than an intellectual one.
It’s an interesting direction to explore and something a modern age of rationalism might benefit from. The distance between human reason (and our sense of justice) and the divine might then be countered by a spiritual closeness available through an experience of the story. Larrimore even discusses a 15th century play, “La Patience de Job” that was widely performed. The play of course is not interpretation-free, as its title indicates.
It’s also important to keep in mind that, for Christians and Christian interpreters of the Book of Job, the story is going to be seen not in isolation or only in the context of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, but in the context of the Christian Bible as a whole. The New Testament presents us with a very different, transformed relationship between humanity and God. Larrimore certainly cites many Christian interpretations, like those of Aquinas and Calvin, but he doesn’t focus a great deal on the differences between Judaic and Christian interpretations.
All in all, a reading of Larrimore’s book doesn’t resolve the story, and it shouldn’t. In fact, the “experience” to be had may be exactly in not resolving the story but in wondering at and about it.
Larrimore’s book combines history with commentary. It’s a history of the Book of Job itself, including an account of differences in the telling of the story both before and after the biblical text we now have. And it’s a history of what writers and thinkers like Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Leibniz, Voltaire and others on up through Elie Wiesel have said by way of interpreting and attempting to resolve the story. And Larrimore contributes his own analyses as well.
The dominant theme is theodicy, or the problem of evil as exemplified in Job’s plight (and his reward). But other questions are raised as well, including Job’s own status as Jew or Gentile, the Christian vs. Judaic interpretations of the story, the possible foreshadowing or even prophecy of Jesus’s suffering, and the moral in terms of what a proper relationship to God is. I’ll talk mainly about theodicy-related themes.
A simple and conventional reading of the story, as a parable with a moral, releases us from much that makes the story interesting and puzzling. God allows Satan to test Job’s faith through suffering, first at the loss of his children and his wealth, and then at the loss of his health and dignity. Job’s faith is tested, but he persists in faith and God rewards him for it in the end. His wealth is doubled and his family restored.
At that we can resolve the story and pack it up as a story of faith tested, proven, and rewarded.
But that leaves out the tensions, the questions, the seeming paradoxes that make the story something we can’t just pack up and store away. Larrimore’s treatment allows us to dwell with the story, puzzle with it, and wonder about it.
The big question is the question of theodicy: how can we reconcile God’s beneficence and omnipotence with the persistence of evil in the world?
The frame story of the Book of Job is a challenge brought to God by Satan. Actually, Larrimore points out that the word here (“hassatan”) that we standardly translate as the proper name “Satan” is actually a term for an “adversary” such as a prosecuting attorney. He often refers to this role as “the satan” rather than as the specific character “Satan.”
God presents Job to Satan as a “perfect” and “upright” man. Satan dares God to allow him to take away Job’s wealth and everything that he has, saying to God that Job “will curse thee to thy face.” Satan’s reasoning is that Job, a man of wealth and good fortune, has no reason to oppose or resist God. Take those things away, and see what happens.
God allows Satan to do exactly that, first taking away Job’s wealth and causing the deaths of his children, and then taking his health and dignity.
Job doesn’t appear to deserve the sufferings that God allows Satan to inflict. He is, in God’s own words, “perfect.” Job himself doesn’t think he deserves his suffering. He does not curse God as Satam predicted, but he “cursed his day” and asked, “Let the day perish wherein I was born.” He complains of God’s treatment and wishes he could plead his case so that God would relent, as if God were behaving unjustly and needs only to be shown his error.
Why does God permit Job’s suffering? Although God is not inflicting the punishments, he is explicitly permitting Satan to do so. God could simply forbid it. He is omnipotent and beneficent, so why does he permit Job to suffer?
Maybe the obvious answer is that God is answering Satan’s challenge. You could argue that Job’s suffering is justified by the need for God to answer Satan’s challenge, that, in some sense (moral or otherwise), answering Satan’s challenge is more important or valuable or significant than the apparent injustice done to Job. Job is collateral damage.
And you could argue, as reflected in Job’s friends’ speeches, that Job is a sinner like all humans. Know it or not, Job has sinned. He is suffering justifiably, and he should repent sins that he must have committed but doesn’t know he has committed.
Or you could argue that Job’s sense, and our sense of justice and injustice, is distinct from God’s, that in fact Job’s suffering is justified in God’s sense of justice, a sense we do not and could not possibly understand.
As I read Larrimore’s commentary, the approach I’m drawn to is to take the starting point of the story as definitive — the interaction between God and Satan. What is at stake in the story is what is at stake there — the strength of humanity’s relationship to God. The story of Job’s suffering is in service to that, not a matter of ultimate worth in itself. Job’s suffering is playing a part in the story, and the test, that really matters. That Job’s suffering can’t be justified is insignificant in the light of this larger stake.
But this creates an apparent schism between what matters to God and what matters to secular man. This is somewhat suggested by Aquinas’ interpretation of the story, as it’s reported by Larrimore.
That interpretation expands the separation between God and man, that the purposes of God and the welfare of a man so “perfect” and “upright” could be so far apart. Yes, Job gets his wealth back in the end, and he gets a new family. But his children have perished, and he has undergone the suffering that he has undergone — those things are permanent, devastating, and real.
A similar idea is developed by John Calvin, in his notion of “double justice.” When Job (and we) complain of Job’s suffering, we do so from the standpoint of justice in this world, not divine justice. Were we to try to adopt the God’s-eye-view, what would matter is the quality of creation, not the quality of individuals’ lives.
But that’s a dangerous way to think. It reduces the significance of good and evil in this world, allowing that something, an act that serves God’s purposes, could conflict with and override our (worldly) sense of right and wrong.
There are instances, in the Bible itself, where obedience to God suspends the ethical, in Kierkegaard’s terms. And in doing so, it opens the door to worldly injustice in the name of God. Just as Abraham, the story Kierkegaard is inspired by, agrees to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham is answering a higher call than worldly justice, and he must turn his back on his duty as a father in this world.
Moreover as Calvin says, none of us understands that higher, divine justice. We can’t act in its name (unless directed to do so by God, as Abraham, we are told, is). If we, supposing to understand God’s justice, were to use faith as a weapon against worldly justice we would commit an offense of the same arrogant sort as Job’s (and his friends’) presumption to understand God’s wisdom and a divine sense of justice.
This all leaves us in a precarious position. There is a higher calling, we don’t understand it, and it can suspend, even violate our own sense of right and wrong.
What we’ve done with this approach is push God and humanity far apart from one another. Luther wrote, “God so orders this corporeal world in its external affairs that if you respect and follow the judgement of human reason, you are bound to say either that there is no God or that God is unjust.” Human reason fails. And following faith, even or especially when based in a reading of scripture, is fraught, as Luther and others famously pointed out.
If we go back again to the framing story, we’ll find that the proper relationship between God and man seems to reflect this sense of distance. That relationship, as God says, in his speech at the end of the story, is one of “fear for the Lord.” While the conventional, relatively simple understanding of the story depicts a parable of a test of faith, faith per se doesn’t appear really to be the issue. It isn’t Job’s faith that Satan proposes to test, it is Job’s “fear of God.” And when in Job 28/28, when God speaks of the proper relationship of humankind to God, he says, “Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.”
In fact, the word “faith” doesn’t appear in the text of the Book of Job at all (at least in the King James Version). While the Hebrew word translated as “fear” (yirah) appears to be nuanced, it is not translated as “faith” but more often as “fear” or “awe”, both suggesting difference and distance.
In later chapters, Larrimore moves ahead to Elie Wiesel’s and others’ interpretations of the story of Job in the light of the holocaust. Wiesel’s struggles to come to terms with the story are especially poignant. He asks the question he has to ask, why would God stand by and not intervene in the plight of the Jewish people during the holocaust? As a survivor of Auschwitz, for Wiesel, that’s not an abstract, intellectual question. It’s real and present. And he can’t be satisfied with glib answers. It doesn’t look as if Wiesel ever did resolve the question to his own satisfaction.
Larrimore cites other readings of Job, including some interesting hints of an experiential reading, one that doesn’t so much present the story as something to understand as something to experience in a more dramatic sense. There the story has an experiential, spiritual effect rather than an intellectual one.
It’s an interesting direction to explore and something a modern age of rationalism might benefit from. The distance between human reason (and our sense of justice) and the divine might then be countered by a spiritual closeness available through an experience of the story. Larrimore even discusses a 15th century play, “La Patience de Job” that was widely performed. The play of course is not interpretation-free, as its title indicates.
It’s also important to keep in mind that, for Christians and Christian interpreters of the Book of Job, the story is going to be seen not in isolation or only in the context of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, but in the context of the Christian Bible as a whole. The New Testament presents us with a very different, transformed relationship between humanity and God. Larrimore certainly cites many Christian interpretations, like those of Aquinas and Calvin, but he doesn’t focus a great deal on the differences between Judaic and Christian interpretations.
All in all, a reading of Larrimore’s book doesn’t resolve the story, and it shouldn’t. In fact, the “experience” to be had may be exactly in not resolving the story but in wondering at and about it.
November 14, 2024
It's this and Genesis as the top draft picks out of the 66. A whopper of a story. Enormous and memorable. As confounding as it is comforting to know we don't and won't and shouldn't have the answers.
July 7, 2014
Reading the Biblical Book of Job, one could conclude that God is evil, feckless, or even nonexistent. Not until we get to the Book of Revelation do we find a book so controversial and open to so many meanings. This is why Mark Larrimore has performed a useful service with his The Book of "Job": A Biography, which examines the different interpretations of the book through the ages and through the eye of the present time.
Consider the framing story we find at the book's beginning: God is making a bet with Satan that Job's prosperity is not dependent on the deity's favoring him. He lets the devil do whatever he wishes to Job to affect his worship of the Creator. In the process, Satan runs off his herds and kills his wife and children, leaving the once powerful man bemoaning his faith in a pile of ashes.
From there, it gets even stranger. He is consoled by three "friends" who essentially say it's all his own fault. Then there is a mysterious character named Elihu who emerges with his own interpretation (a probable interpolation by another writer). Finally, God appears himself and essentially says He is All Powerful, Almighty, and where was Job when God created the world?
Because I am not conversant with the language of theology, I missed some of the terms used in Larrimire's book, but I found it useful enough to want to return to it once I have reread the Biblical book in several translations.
Consider the framing story we find at the book's beginning: God is making a bet with Satan that Job's prosperity is not dependent on the deity's favoring him. He lets the devil do whatever he wishes to Job to affect his worship of the Creator. In the process, Satan runs off his herds and kills his wife and children, leaving the once powerful man bemoaning his faith in a pile of ashes.
From there, it gets even stranger. He is consoled by three "friends" who essentially say it's all his own fault. Then there is a mysterious character named Elihu who emerges with his own interpretation (a probable interpolation by another writer). Finally, God appears himself and essentially says He is All Powerful, Almighty, and where was Job when God created the world?
Because I am not conversant with the language of theology, I missed some of the terms used in Larrimire's book, but I found it useful enough to want to return to it once I have reread the Biblical book in several translations.
May 20, 2021
A very well written examination of the Book of Job. Larrimore does an excellent job examining the book on its own, as well as the views of various generations of those who have been drawn to this paradoxical and provocative book. I like his objective analysis and respect for all the traditions, from the literalist view to the post-modern. Bottom line is that we can only begin to grasp God's greatness or his ways in snatches--through the poetry, the railing against God but the ultimate acceptance of God's unfathomable greatness.
Some of the corollaries are fascinating-that what we should do when confronted with suffering or depression of friends, we should not (as opposed to Job's "friends") take a God's-eye view in trying to explain why the sufferer is suffering, but rather to listen and share the knowledge that life on earth is aspirational to Heaven--not Heaven itself.
well worth reading.
Some of the corollaries are fascinating-that what we should do when confronted with suffering or depression of friends, we should not (as opposed to Job's "friends") take a God's-eye view in trying to explain why the sufferer is suffering, but rather to listen and share the knowledge that life on earth is aspirational to Heaven--not Heaven itself.
well worth reading.
July 15, 2024
Well written and interesting journalistic history of the book of Job and certain of its more prominent receptions/consequences.
March 31, 2015
Wow, I finally finished this book! I bought it when I heard the author speak on Radio West, and I found interesting what he had to say about faith and the suffering of innocents. I wasn't paying enough attention to realize that his book was an academic one. I've never read an academic book all the way through (I've never even read my husband's dissertation. I know, I'm a terrible person) and there were times when I did not understand terminology, but I was able to come away with a completely new perspective on the book of Job, which is my new favorite book of scripture. The man has read virtually everything ever written in history about the book, and presents and interprets what he's learned in this book. The book of Job is for everyone who has ever suffered, or known someone who has suffered, and it was extremely interesting to see the different lenses though which people have seen this story through the ages. Thanks, Mark!
July 18, 2016
Mark Larrimore writes in his book: 'Keeping company with Job, as friend or interpreter, is a worthy activity....' An interview...
Interview: Mark Larrimore wrote ‘The Book of Job: A Biography’
Keeping company with Job, as friend or interpreter, is a worthy activity. Only the one who sees no challenge in Job or the questions his book is thought to raise should be dismissed. Recognizing that Job’s questions are not only “unfinished” in the book of job but “unfinishable”, we may conclude only that our obligation is to keep the retelling going in all its difficulty. This means learning to listen to every part of the text, and perhaps also to every serious past attempt to enter the argument—joining the long line of interventions that began with Elihu. Showing how or why this might be done has been the intention of this book.
Professor Mark Larrimore, author at New School New York City
Author Mark Larrimore, at New School New York City
photo by NiQyira Rajhi for the New School Free Press
by Peter Menkin
How I do like the way Mark Larrimore has begun his work, “The Book of Job: A Biography.” There is a chill to the start. Here are the first sentences of his book, part of a series by Princeton University Press:
The book of Job tells of a wealthy and virtuous man in an unfamiliar land in the East. His virtue is so great that God points him out to hassatan—literally the satan. “the adversary.” a sort of prosecuting attorney in the divine court, who, whether by temperament or profession, is skeptical regarding the possibility of genuine human piety.
There in the introduction to this interesting work that is part of the very complete and large series of titles, “Lives of Great Religious Books,” we find quickly a sense of foreboding. The series is described by Princeton University Press this way, in case you didn’know:”Lives of Great Religious Books is a series of short volumes that recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world. Written for general readers by leading authors and experts, these books examine the historical origins of texts from the great religious traditions, and trace how their reception, interpretation, and influence have changed–often radically–over time. As these stories of translation, adaptation, appropriation, and inspiration dramatically remind us, all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns.”
Let us give ear to author Mark Larimore’s own recitation on the radio to a longish interview with Tom Ashbrook who says of Job in his introduction to the talk:
The Book of Job is a brutal corner of the Bible. A good man, Job, thrown arbitrarily, suddenly, into a life of absolute agony. Stripped of his wealth. His children killed. Plagued and hounded and showered with misery. His only consolation is sounds like none: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Deal with it. The Book of Job is so harsh. It’s about unrelieved injustice and the suffering of innocent humans. About grief and rage and the human condition. And maybe about wisdom that goes right beyond the Bible. Up next On Point: The Book of Job, and life right now.
– Tom Ashbrook
The broadcast is here and this is its title:
The ‘Book of Job’ In the Modern Age
The Book of Job and the trials of Job. Hard and endless. We’ll ask what the hard old Bible story has to say now.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/10/10/bo...
A man with a PhD from Princeton who teaches at the innovative or some would say liberal and even small, special New York City University with the excellent reputation The New School, Mark Larrimore is consistently rated by students a superior teacher and a very interesting one. Called by editor of Princeton University Press a very talented up and coming writer, the promising and talented Mark Larrimore is a good talker who is a pleasure to engage in a conversation and a man who has what used to be called “good vibes” with lots of energy and good sense, too. That is judging by his intelligent and educated conversation that holds ones interest: he is to put it more briefly, engaging.
This short statement from his University profile says much of the character of his course material, and this is a quote: “The study of religion and liberal education are indispensable to each other because religion is so often illiberal and liberals so often anti-religious.” To reach the Professor by email, write him larrimom@newschool.edu .
Since 2002, Mark Larrimore has been teaching Religious Studies at Eugene Lang College. In this interview conducted by WNSR’s James Lowenthal for 25@25, Larrimore discusses his discipline and its relation to the Lang community, and the various changes he has seen during his time at Lang.
Here is that radio interview:
Feature Broadcast on May 9, 2011
Feature: 25@25: WNSR Interviews Mark Larrimore
Mark Larrimore is a man who as writer of the work on Job thinks. This excerpt gives evidence of his efforts to find meaning and even some ongoing effort at working out the difficulties of the Book of Job…it’s kind of ongoing effect on readers through centuries of different readers and times:
Keeping company with Job, as friend or interpreter, is a worthy activity. Only the one who sees no challenge in Job or the questions his book is thought to raise should be dismissed. Recognizing that Job’s questions are not only “unfinished” in the book of job but “unfinishable”, we may conclude only that our obligation is to keep the retelling going in all its difficulty. This means learning to listen to every part of the text, and perhaps also to every serious past attempt to enter the argument—joining the long line of interventions that began with Elihu. Showing how or why this might be done has been the intention of this book.
An interview with the author Mark Larrimore was held with questions sent in writing and answers given in writing to Religion Writer Peter Menkin.
INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR MARK LARRIMORE WITH PETER MENKIN
Mark Larrimore, author of “The Book of Job: A Biography” (The words of the whirlwind} and a professor of religious studies at The New School. The book is also found here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/100... .
1. 1. During the three years you worked on “The Book of Job: A Biography,” did you find the creation and research a kind of meditation? If so, tell us something of your meditation. Yes, this is a broad question, and to narrow it down: In what way did you find Job a Christian statement in your meditation, if at all?
Let me take that as two questions. Was it a kind of meditation? Yes, absolutely. I understand Job to be very significantly about our inability to understand the suffering of others, and even to acknowledge what profound questions it poses for our own religious views. The book is about interpretation and its failures. For me it’s a meditation on the experience of others, on our duty not to forget others in our own meditations. As I make clear in the introduction to my book, I do not come to the Book of Job out of world-wrenching suffering of my own. The Book of Job demands of me that I admit this. To the extent that it argues that extreme pain and anguish give a privileged understanding of things, an insight not attainable in any other way, I shouldn’t be interpreting it. But then my book isn’t my take on Job but an effort to provide resources for anyone’s effort to make sense of this book and the momentous questions it names, introducing interpretations and uses which are far deeper than any I could come up with.
Larrimore_BkJob
Was mine a Christian meditation? Not so much. In part that’s because I attempted the perhaps impossible task of discussing the Book of Job as not clearly Jewish, or Christian, or humanistic – but also not free-standing, self-contained and self-interpreting. If we don’t ignore parts of it (as many readings do), the BoJ is troubling and difficult enough that it pretty much forces us to seek help wherever we think that can be found. It’s not a coincidence that Gregory the Great’s Morals in Job wound up drawing on pretty much the whole rest of the Christian scriptures. But this will be different for people of different faith backgrounds. I obviously drew on materials from Jewish as well as Christian traditions, as well as the essentially humanistic textual, historical and literary scholarship on which not only secular but many contemporary religious interpretations build.
1. 2. As both writer and scholar, let us turn to the exercise of writer as participant in this larger series, Lives of Great Religious Books. Was your work part of a discussion with others or mainly a matter as a writer of solitary activity? Here the question is narrowed to the activity of the writing of “The Book of Job: A Biography,” or of its research and the reading of the Bible itself.
My book stems from a seminar I teach on interpretations of the Book of Job. I was pleased to be asked to contribute to the LGRB series, and also pleased at the discretion the editor gave us to define the project in our own way. In my college every course, no matter how specific its subject matter, also has to be an introduction to its discipline, so my “Reading Job” course was also an introduction to religious studies, to religious studies ways of reading. I think that’s reflected in the book – I hope so. I might add also that the course is a seminar, where mine is only one voice among others. I may have been wrestling with this text longer than the others in the discussion, and certainly have read more books about it, but that didn’t prevent my students from surprising and enlightening me on many, many occasions.
When it came to writing the book I didn’t seek out many new conversation partners but that didn’t make it a solitary activity. I wrote it alone – indeed, many of my colleagues had no idea I was working on it! – but the colloquium of the seminar continued in my head as I was writing. I regret profoundly not having got my acknowledgments to the press in time for inclusion in my book. I would have included the names of all my students.
1. 3. Does Job engage you in a personal way, and how so did the book you wrote and the Book of Job itself especially finds you as a human being?
I want to say one would have to be inhuman not to be engaged by this story—except that, as I show in the book, many people turned away, condemning Job for his pride; some, more recently, condemn him for his “capitulation” at the end. Perhaps that’s human, too. And of course it’s precisely what the Book of Job predicts. I tried not to judge Job but to listen to him. That’s not always easy, as the fate of his friends shows. Indeed I recognized myself in the friends as much as in him, and am almost as critical of those who write off the friends without listening to them as to those who omit the parts of Job’s speeches they don’t want to deal with. I want to coopt Santayana here and say that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the friends are doomed to repeat them.
I also think it’s a great hubristic temptation to take God’s side and speak for him – the one thing everyone agrees the Book of Job warns against! I don’t do it in the book but I can say here that I find something very powerful in the divine speeches. Some forms of theological thinking and feeling are rendered obsolete by the vastness of outer and inner space discovered to us by science, but not this.
1. 4. Does God act out of character in smiting Job, or is it solely the work of Satan?
It’s certainly not just the work of the satan: Satan hadn’t happened yet. But even in the later tradition which reads hassatan as Satan, the larger question is the same. If God’s in control, then the sources of human affliction are operating with divine permission. What’s particularly troubling about Job is that the usual arguments for divine permission aren’t made. It may be, as later interpreters say, that the affliction was for Job’s own good, but he’s never told that (except by Elihu, and God never says so). Instead, it seems like God is passing the time in heaven by inviting the prosecuting attorney of the heavenly court (hassatan) to test his favorite pet. Hassatan is just doing his job. It is God who acts out of character here. Or we might have to say that the Book of Job shows that our understandings of God’s character are inadequate. I don’t mention King Lear in the book but that’s a very Joban play. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport” is a very Joban thought.
1. 5. In the conception and execution of this book was this work you did one of the scholar or of the teacher?
Perhaps because I teach at a seminar college, it’s a little difficult for me to distinguish these. I don’t lecture but try to structure spaces of reading and discussion where students learn how to keep learning, how to become a teacher, how to become a scholar. I want my students, and the readers of my book, to learn how to do what I’m doing – how to read, how to have the confidence to form interpretations and the humility to challenge them, how to trace the sources of a work, the drama of a debate, the history of an idea, the uses of a story.
I might add that, when it comes to the Book of Job, I feel myself as much student as scholar. I am not a Hebraist or Biblical scholar – I came at this material from the other end, working my way backward from modern philosophy and religious life to its sources. I would not have been able to write my book without leaning very heavily on the work of scholars like Carol Newsom, David Clines, James Kugel, Bruce Zuckerman, Robert Eisen, Lawrence Besserman, Susan Schreiner… In this connection I suppose I’m teaching that you don’t need to be a scholar of the Hebrew Bible to be able to engage and explore it. Most of the interpreters I discuss in my book weren’t Hebraists either.
Job with friends
Job with friends etc.
1. 6. Talk to us about the reader in your mind when you wrote the book?
I didn’t really know who my readers might be. This was my first time writing something which might reach beyond the halls of academe. It was a little hard fixing an image of the educated lay reader I was trying to be of service to. So sometimes I was thinking of my friends and students, sometimes of readers of other books in the Lives of Great Religious Books series, sometimes of my parents! I had had the pleasure of leading a four-session discussion group on the Book of Job at my church (the Church of the Holy Apostles), so I imagined study groups as another possible readership – though these discussions made me feel very much the bookish academic! Only very late in the process, as a friend who’s studying at Union Theological Seminary was working through the text with me, did it occur to me that it might also be of use in seminaries.
1. 7. In your book you stress that the Book of Job is read differently by people from different faith traditions, or from none, and appropriately so. What are some distinctly Christian ways of reading it, and do you think they can be of value for other readers?
It makes sense for people to read a sacred text in the context of the whole canon of scripture – especially for a text as full of puzzles and paradoxes as Job. It’s distinctive of this modern chapter in the history of the Book of Job that people think they should read it on its own, out of any context.
The traditional Christian reading is allegorical: Job is a “type” for Christ. Like all Old Testament texts, it’s a riddle which can’t be solved without the key of the New Testament. But although typology is intellectually and historically very interesting, I’m not sure anyone really knows how to think that way anymore. The folks at Oberammergau tried to bring it back in their most recent Passion Play, juxtaposing a scene of Job’s quarrel with his friends with the mocking of Christ, but I suspect most viewers just saw it as a parallel.
The much-celebrated “patience of Job” is Christian, too – the phrase comes not from the Old Testament but from the New Testament Epistle of James. I dare say it’s the dominant understanding of the story among Christians: God pushes nobody farther than s/he can go, God has God’s own reasons for striking human beings with afflictions but if we abide patiently we will be amply rewarded. Job’s suffering here isn’t a parallel to Christ’s but to our own. In my book I try to suggest that if Job defines what patience is – all of the Book of Job, not just the first two chapters! – then we may need a more robust understanding of what patience means. That more robust understanding, largely forgotten among Christians today, is deeper and richer than mere servile, masochistic silence. Job’s world has fallen apart. He feels abandoned, indeed persecuted by God – and he says so.
Job’s recantation, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” has been an important part of Christian understandings of Job, too, but there are good textual reasons to question this translation. It is not that Job – the most virtuous human being – is a despicable sinner, but that, compared to the infinite power and majesty of God, the merely created is as nothing. But one shouldn’t stop there, for in the Book of Job the infinitely powerful and majestic One knows and is proud of this nothing, and even speaks to him.
Many of these ways of understanding Job could be shared by non-Christians. I’ve had wonderful discussions about these topics with a Hindu friend, for instance. It was also in conversation with her that I realized just how astonishing is the Christian belief that God subjected Godself to Job’s human experiences of anguish and abandonment out of love for the world.
1. 8. It’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance through these questions. Have we missed anything important? If so, please talk to us about what we’ve missed now.
Thank you for the wonderfully thoughtful questions. One of the great satisfactions of this project is the quality of conversations it has generated, from each of which I learn a little bit more about the Book of Job and its continuing power to help us wrestle with the most important questions.
APPENDIX I
“The Book of Job: A Biography” by Mark Larrimore. by OnPointRadio
APPENDIX II
Published on Apr 28, 2012
(Audio Narration by: Max Mclean).
This work originally appeared Church of England Newspaper, London.
Interview: Mark Larrimore wrote ‘The Book of Job: A Biography’
Keeping company with Job, as friend or interpreter, is a worthy activity. Only the one who sees no challenge in Job or the questions his book is thought to raise should be dismissed. Recognizing that Job’s questions are not only “unfinished” in the book of job but “unfinishable”, we may conclude only that our obligation is to keep the retelling going in all its difficulty. This means learning to listen to every part of the text, and perhaps also to every serious past attempt to enter the argument—joining the long line of interventions that began with Elihu. Showing how or why this might be done has been the intention of this book.
Professor Mark Larrimore, author at New School New York City
Author Mark Larrimore, at New School New York City
photo by NiQyira Rajhi for the New School Free Press
by Peter Menkin
How I do like the way Mark Larrimore has begun his work, “The Book of Job: A Biography.” There is a chill to the start. Here are the first sentences of his book, part of a series by Princeton University Press:
The book of Job tells of a wealthy and virtuous man in an unfamiliar land in the East. His virtue is so great that God points him out to hassatan—literally the satan. “the adversary.” a sort of prosecuting attorney in the divine court, who, whether by temperament or profession, is skeptical regarding the possibility of genuine human piety.
There in the introduction to this interesting work that is part of the very complete and large series of titles, “Lives of Great Religious Books,” we find quickly a sense of foreboding. The series is described by Princeton University Press this way, in case you didn’know:”Lives of Great Religious Books is a series of short volumes that recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts from around the world. Written for general readers by leading authors and experts, these books examine the historical origins of texts from the great religious traditions, and trace how their reception, interpretation, and influence have changed–often radically–over time. As these stories of translation, adaptation, appropriation, and inspiration dramatically remind us, all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns.”
Let us give ear to author Mark Larimore’s own recitation on the radio to a longish interview with Tom Ashbrook who says of Job in his introduction to the talk:
The Book of Job is a brutal corner of the Bible. A good man, Job, thrown arbitrarily, suddenly, into a life of absolute agony. Stripped of his wealth. His children killed. Plagued and hounded and showered with misery. His only consolation is sounds like none: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Deal with it. The Book of Job is so harsh. It’s about unrelieved injustice and the suffering of innocent humans. About grief and rage and the human condition. And maybe about wisdom that goes right beyond the Bible. Up next On Point: The Book of Job, and life right now.
– Tom Ashbrook
The broadcast is here and this is its title:
The ‘Book of Job’ In the Modern Age
The Book of Job and the trials of Job. Hard and endless. We’ll ask what the hard old Bible story has to say now.
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/10/10/bo...
A man with a PhD from Princeton who teaches at the innovative or some would say liberal and even small, special New York City University with the excellent reputation The New School, Mark Larrimore is consistently rated by students a superior teacher and a very interesting one. Called by editor of Princeton University Press a very talented up and coming writer, the promising and talented Mark Larrimore is a good talker who is a pleasure to engage in a conversation and a man who has what used to be called “good vibes” with lots of energy and good sense, too. That is judging by his intelligent and educated conversation that holds ones interest: he is to put it more briefly, engaging.
This short statement from his University profile says much of the character of his course material, and this is a quote: “The study of religion and liberal education are indispensable to each other because religion is so often illiberal and liberals so often anti-religious.” To reach the Professor by email, write him larrimom@newschool.edu .
Since 2002, Mark Larrimore has been teaching Religious Studies at Eugene Lang College. In this interview conducted by WNSR’s James Lowenthal for 25@25, Larrimore discusses his discipline and its relation to the Lang community, and the various changes he has seen during his time at Lang.
Here is that radio interview:
Feature Broadcast on May 9, 2011
Feature: 25@25: WNSR Interviews Mark Larrimore
Mark Larrimore is a man who as writer of the work on Job thinks. This excerpt gives evidence of his efforts to find meaning and even some ongoing effort at working out the difficulties of the Book of Job…it’s kind of ongoing effect on readers through centuries of different readers and times:
Keeping company with Job, as friend or interpreter, is a worthy activity. Only the one who sees no challenge in Job or the questions his book is thought to raise should be dismissed. Recognizing that Job’s questions are not only “unfinished” in the book of job but “unfinishable”, we may conclude only that our obligation is to keep the retelling going in all its difficulty. This means learning to listen to every part of the text, and perhaps also to every serious past attempt to enter the argument—joining the long line of interventions that began with Elihu. Showing how or why this might be done has been the intention of this book.
An interview with the author Mark Larrimore was held with questions sent in writing and answers given in writing to Religion Writer Peter Menkin.
INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR MARK LARRIMORE WITH PETER MENKIN
Mark Larrimore, author of “The Book of Job: A Biography” (The words of the whirlwind} and a professor of religious studies at The New School. The book is also found here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/100... .
1. 1. During the three years you worked on “The Book of Job: A Biography,” did you find the creation and research a kind of meditation? If so, tell us something of your meditation. Yes, this is a broad question, and to narrow it down: In what way did you find Job a Christian statement in your meditation, if at all?
Let me take that as two questions. Was it a kind of meditation? Yes, absolutely. I understand Job to be very significantly about our inability to understand the suffering of others, and even to acknowledge what profound questions it poses for our own religious views. The book is about interpretation and its failures. For me it’s a meditation on the experience of others, on our duty not to forget others in our own meditations. As I make clear in the introduction to my book, I do not come to the Book of Job out of world-wrenching suffering of my own. The Book of Job demands of me that I admit this. To the extent that it argues that extreme pain and anguish give a privileged understanding of things, an insight not attainable in any other way, I shouldn’t be interpreting it. But then my book isn’t my take on Job but an effort to provide resources for anyone’s effort to make sense of this book and the momentous questions it names, introducing interpretations and uses which are far deeper than any I could come up with.
Larrimore_BkJob
Was mine a Christian meditation? Not so much. In part that’s because I attempted the perhaps impossible task of discussing the Book of Job as not clearly Jewish, or Christian, or humanistic – but also not free-standing, self-contained and self-interpreting. If we don’t ignore parts of it (as many readings do), the BoJ is troubling and difficult enough that it pretty much forces us to seek help wherever we think that can be found. It’s not a coincidence that Gregory the Great’s Morals in Job wound up drawing on pretty much the whole rest of the Christian scriptures. But this will be different for people of different faith backgrounds. I obviously drew on materials from Jewish as well as Christian traditions, as well as the essentially humanistic textual, historical and literary scholarship on which not only secular but many contemporary religious interpretations build.
1. 2. As both writer and scholar, let us turn to the exercise of writer as participant in this larger series, Lives of Great Religious Books. Was your work part of a discussion with others or mainly a matter as a writer of solitary activity? Here the question is narrowed to the activity of the writing of “The Book of Job: A Biography,” or of its research and the reading of the Bible itself.
My book stems from a seminar I teach on interpretations of the Book of Job. I was pleased to be asked to contribute to the LGRB series, and also pleased at the discretion the editor gave us to define the project in our own way. In my college every course, no matter how specific its subject matter, also has to be an introduction to its discipline, so my “Reading Job” course was also an introduction to religious studies, to religious studies ways of reading. I think that’s reflected in the book – I hope so. I might add also that the course is a seminar, where mine is only one voice among others. I may have been wrestling with this text longer than the others in the discussion, and certainly have read more books about it, but that didn’t prevent my students from surprising and enlightening me on many, many occasions.
When it came to writing the book I didn’t seek out many new conversation partners but that didn’t make it a solitary activity. I wrote it alone – indeed, many of my colleagues had no idea I was working on it! – but the colloquium of the seminar continued in my head as I was writing. I regret profoundly not having got my acknowledgments to the press in time for inclusion in my book. I would have included the names of all my students.
1. 3. Does Job engage you in a personal way, and how so did the book you wrote and the Book of Job itself especially finds you as a human being?
I want to say one would have to be inhuman not to be engaged by this story—except that, as I show in the book, many people turned away, condemning Job for his pride; some, more recently, condemn him for his “capitulation” at the end. Perhaps that’s human, too. And of course it’s precisely what the Book of Job predicts. I tried not to judge Job but to listen to him. That’s not always easy, as the fate of his friends shows. Indeed I recognized myself in the friends as much as in him, and am almost as critical of those who write off the friends without listening to them as to those who omit the parts of Job’s speeches they don’t want to deal with. I want to coopt Santayana here and say that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the friends are doomed to repeat them.
I also think it’s a great hubristic temptation to take God’s side and speak for him – the one thing everyone agrees the Book of Job warns against! I don’t do it in the book but I can say here that I find something very powerful in the divine speeches. Some forms of theological thinking and feeling are rendered obsolete by the vastness of outer and inner space discovered to us by science, but not this.
1. 4. Does God act out of character in smiting Job, or is it solely the work of Satan?
It’s certainly not just the work of the satan: Satan hadn’t happened yet. But even in the later tradition which reads hassatan as Satan, the larger question is the same. If God’s in control, then the sources of human affliction are operating with divine permission. What’s particularly troubling about Job is that the usual arguments for divine permission aren’t made. It may be, as later interpreters say, that the affliction was for Job’s own good, but he’s never told that (except by Elihu, and God never says so). Instead, it seems like God is passing the time in heaven by inviting the prosecuting attorney of the heavenly court (hassatan) to test his favorite pet. Hassatan is just doing his job. It is God who acts out of character here. Or we might have to say that the Book of Job shows that our understandings of God’s character are inadequate. I don’t mention King Lear in the book but that’s a very Joban play. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport” is a very Joban thought.
1. 5. In the conception and execution of this book was this work you did one of the scholar or of the teacher?
Perhaps because I teach at a seminar college, it’s a little difficult for me to distinguish these. I don’t lecture but try to structure spaces of reading and discussion where students learn how to keep learning, how to become a teacher, how to become a scholar. I want my students, and the readers of my book, to learn how to do what I’m doing – how to read, how to have the confidence to form interpretations and the humility to challenge them, how to trace the sources of a work, the drama of a debate, the history of an idea, the uses of a story.
I might add that, when it comes to the Book of Job, I feel myself as much student as scholar. I am not a Hebraist or Biblical scholar – I came at this material from the other end, working my way backward from modern philosophy and religious life to its sources. I would not have been able to write my book without leaning very heavily on the work of scholars like Carol Newsom, David Clines, James Kugel, Bruce Zuckerman, Robert Eisen, Lawrence Besserman, Susan Schreiner… In this connection I suppose I’m teaching that you don’t need to be a scholar of the Hebrew Bible to be able to engage and explore it. Most of the interpreters I discuss in my book weren’t Hebraists either.
Job with friends
Job with friends etc.
1. 6. Talk to us about the reader in your mind when you wrote the book?
I didn’t really know who my readers might be. This was my first time writing something which might reach beyond the halls of academe. It was a little hard fixing an image of the educated lay reader I was trying to be of service to. So sometimes I was thinking of my friends and students, sometimes of readers of other books in the Lives of Great Religious Books series, sometimes of my parents! I had had the pleasure of leading a four-session discussion group on the Book of Job at my church (the Church of the Holy Apostles), so I imagined study groups as another possible readership – though these discussions made me feel very much the bookish academic! Only very late in the process, as a friend who’s studying at Union Theological Seminary was working through the text with me, did it occur to me that it might also be of use in seminaries.
1. 7. In your book you stress that the Book of Job is read differently by people from different faith traditions, or from none, and appropriately so. What are some distinctly Christian ways of reading it, and do you think they can be of value for other readers?
It makes sense for people to read a sacred text in the context of the whole canon of scripture – especially for a text as full of puzzles and paradoxes as Job. It’s distinctive of this modern chapter in the history of the Book of Job that people think they should read it on its own, out of any context.
The traditional Christian reading is allegorical: Job is a “type” for Christ. Like all Old Testament texts, it’s a riddle which can’t be solved without the key of the New Testament. But although typology is intellectually and historically very interesting, I’m not sure anyone really knows how to think that way anymore. The folks at Oberammergau tried to bring it back in their most recent Passion Play, juxtaposing a scene of Job’s quarrel with his friends with the mocking of Christ, but I suspect most viewers just saw it as a parallel.
The much-celebrated “patience of Job” is Christian, too – the phrase comes not from the Old Testament but from the New Testament Epistle of James. I dare say it’s the dominant understanding of the story among Christians: God pushes nobody farther than s/he can go, God has God’s own reasons for striking human beings with afflictions but if we abide patiently we will be amply rewarded. Job’s suffering here isn’t a parallel to Christ’s but to our own. In my book I try to suggest that if Job defines what patience is – all of the Book of Job, not just the first two chapters! – then we may need a more robust understanding of what patience means. That more robust understanding, largely forgotten among Christians today, is deeper and richer than mere servile, masochistic silence. Job’s world has fallen apart. He feels abandoned, indeed persecuted by God – and he says so.
Job’s recantation, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” has been an important part of Christian understandings of Job, too, but there are good textual reasons to question this translation. It is not that Job – the most virtuous human being – is a despicable sinner, but that, compared to the infinite power and majesty of God, the merely created is as nothing. But one shouldn’t stop there, for in the Book of Job the infinitely powerful and majestic One knows and is proud of this nothing, and even speaks to him.
Many of these ways of understanding Job could be shared by non-Christians. I’ve had wonderful discussions about these topics with a Hindu friend, for instance. It was also in conversation with her that I realized just how astonishing is the Christian belief that God subjected Godself to Job’s human experiences of anguish and abandonment out of love for the world.
1. 8. It’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance through these questions. Have we missed anything important? If so, please talk to us about what we’ve missed now.
Thank you for the wonderfully thoughtful questions. One of the great satisfactions of this project is the quality of conversations it has generated, from each of which I learn a little bit more about the Book of Job and its continuing power to help us wrestle with the most important questions.
APPENDIX I
“The Book of Job: A Biography” by Mark Larrimore. by OnPointRadio
APPENDIX II
Published on Apr 28, 2012
(Audio Narration by: Max Mclean).
This work originally appeared Church of England Newspaper, London.
January 16, 2026
Secular treatments of religious books have a tendency to come across as either scornful or patronizing toward "simplistic" traditional beliefs. This book manages to avoid both pitfalls: it covers the major interpretive traditions of the book of Job (Christian, Jewish, and secular; modern and premodern; literary and theological) and manages to take each view seriously on its own terms. While the author seems to accept the modern text-critical view that Job was written in stages by multiple authors, he emphasizes that while multiple authorship could be a source of the tensions and seeming contradictions in the text, it does not resolve those tensions any more than the other views do. Someone had to compile those disparate texts, after all, and even those authors or compilers were engaging with the complexities of Job's story in their own way. Larrimore does not rush to rule out divine inspiration of the text, and acknowledges that even someone who takes a multiple authorship view could still see God's providential hand in the book reaching its current form.
Larrimore makes clear throughout that, in nearly every interpretive tradition, the fact that the book is so unsettling or even unsatisfying is arguably the point. Even the commentators who try to interpret Job in a neat, faith-affirming way just end up proving how messy the book is. This is a book that, on a human or divine level, is meant to give us more questions than answers. No tradition, skeptical or faith-affirming, has ever exhausted the message of Job, but along the way, it forces us to think deeply about how we approach human suffering and what trust in God looks like.
Larrimore makes clear throughout that, in nearly every interpretive tradition, the fact that the book is so unsettling or even unsatisfying is arguably the point. Even the commentators who try to interpret Job in a neat, faith-affirming way just end up proving how messy the book is. This is a book that, on a human or divine level, is meant to give us more questions than answers. No tradition, skeptical or faith-affirming, has ever exhausted the message of Job, but along the way, it forces us to think deeply about how we approach human suffering and what trust in God looks like.
June 26, 2024
Really great approach and execution.
While not an exhaustive catalogue of the interpretive history on the book, it's a fun and enlightening romp. Perfect for a book of this length written for popular consumption. As someone who is firmly convinced of Scripture's divine authorship, I was intrigued to see all of the various ways this book has pushed and prodded different interpretive streams throughout the ages. The whole world was called into being by the word's of God, so how much more should the written record of God's words continue to make and shape the world? "So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it" Isaiah 55:11.
Highlights were: the Midrashic reading that Job had been an advisor to Pharaoh and was "thrown to the wolves" to appease the demon Samael while Israel crossed the red sea (wild, terrible); Gregory the Great (the "last good Pope" according to Calvin) writings "Moralia on the Book of Job" with extensive, kaleidoscopic interpretations of the metaphorical meanings of the book; then Margarete Susman's observation that the friends were themselves unbalanced by Job's downfall, since he had been such a stalwart pillar of the community, but that what they should've said was just, "Why you and not me, Job, you are such a godly man?"
While not an exhaustive catalogue of the interpretive history on the book, it's a fun and enlightening romp. Perfect for a book of this length written for popular consumption. As someone who is firmly convinced of Scripture's divine authorship, I was intrigued to see all of the various ways this book has pushed and prodded different interpretive streams throughout the ages. The whole world was called into being by the word's of God, so how much more should the written record of God's words continue to make and shape the world? "So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it" Isaiah 55:11.
Highlights were: the Midrashic reading that Job had been an advisor to Pharaoh and was "thrown to the wolves" to appease the demon Samael while Israel crossed the red sea (wild, terrible); Gregory the Great (the "last good Pope" according to Calvin) writings "Moralia on the Book of Job" with extensive, kaleidoscopic interpretations of the metaphorical meanings of the book; then Margarete Susman's observation that the friends were themselves unbalanced by Job's downfall, since he had been such a stalwart pillar of the community, but that what they should've said was just, "Why you and not me, Job, you are such a godly man?"
June 18, 2024
Very good overview of Job, both the textual problems suggesting insertions and incomplete coverage, as well as the historical attempts at theological analysis from both the judaic and christian traditions, the more modern contexts of the text from its use in understanding the holocaust to the influence on the theodicy problem as religion battles losing relevance in the modern world.
Just don't go into it looking for some unanimous solutions to the problems it brings up, because the answers are all rickety bridges over a very deep chasm. All commentators seem to realize Job presents a theological problem with few good solutions even as they present their spin on an answer.
Just don't go into it looking for some unanimous solutions to the problems it brings up, because the answers are all rickety bridges over a very deep chasm. All commentators seem to realize Job presents a theological problem with few good solutions even as they present their spin on an answer.
January 31, 2021
A great guide
Survey of how the Book of Job has been read, performed, and interpreted through the centuries. The many voices and layers combined with intense experience and drama of Job prevent any one reading from being satisfying.
I found this quote to best sum up Job:
his book records the strange and painful discovery that God’s presence is felt most keenly in what might otherwise seem his absences: in the ethical irrationality of the world, and especially in those experiences of loss and suffering that defy human conceptions of justice or meaning.
Survey of how the Book of Job has been read, performed, and interpreted through the centuries. The many voices and layers combined with intense experience and drama of Job prevent any one reading from being satisfying.
I found this quote to best sum up Job:
his book records the strange and painful discovery that God’s presence is felt most keenly in what might otherwise seem his absences: in the ethical irrationality of the world, and especially in those experiences of loss and suffering that defy human conceptions of justice or meaning.
April 25, 2022
An interesting interaction with various sources and perspectives in the history of interpreting the book of Job.
This is a well written and readable work that engages with a wide variety of readers of Job. As a conservative Protestant I don't know that I'm edified, or helped in my interpretation, but it's not a bad thing to engage with the thoughts of those who view the world and the scriptures differently than I do.
This is a well written and readable work that engages with a wide variety of readers of Job. As a conservative Protestant I don't know that I'm edified, or helped in my interpretation, but it's not a bad thing to engage with the thoughts of those who view the world and the scriptures differently than I do.
March 12, 2023
"The world of our experience seems to run on entirely amoral, indeed inhuman, laws. Our moral agency seems to make no dent in it, and it is hard not to wonder sometimes if the moral law is just an illusion. In order that anything make sense, we need to have faith in a God who might make possible a harmonization of the moral and physical worlds, which we cannot ourselves conceive."
October 19, 2024
Fascinating, insightful and thought provoking look at the book of Job through history, theology, liturgy, literature and more. Such a difficult and enigmatic book but perhaps that is what makes it so fascinating. Big fan of The Lives of Religious Books series and this is a great example of why.
July 30, 2023
Chapter 4 the most useful/interesting
August 18, 2023
This seemed oddly superficial even given that it was for general readers and not specialists.
December 26, 2023
Wrote an entire paper on this book, so incredibly rich and exciting.
May 11, 2024
The book makes you rethink the complexity of this ancient Biblical story
August 17, 2024
Really well-written book!! Enjoyed it on several different levels
April 12, 2025
More a primer on the various theological theories of Job (in the order in which they appeared) than any sort of historical accounting of book, possibly because so much of its origin is unclear.
My reaction is entirely personal here; Larrimore occasionally digs into ideas that I find unpersuasive (bordering on jejune), and lightly skips over philosophical implications I think quite compelling. But that is arguably the point of primers - it's easy to track down primary sources for the ideas that interest me and skip the rest.
My reaction is entirely personal here; Larrimore occasionally digs into ideas that I find unpersuasive (bordering on jejune), and lightly skips over philosophical implications I think quite compelling. But that is arguably the point of primers - it's easy to track down primary sources for the ideas that interest me and skip the rest.
July 10, 2021
A really excellent large-scale study of the history of the interpretation of Job. The book is split into five chapters, each focused on a different era and style of interpretation: ancient midrashic Jewish and allegorical Christian readings, along with the retelling of the story found in the Testament of Job; medieval frameworks of philosophical dialogue, whether that is the apophatic theology of Maimonides or the philosophical disputation of Aquinas; Job an "enacted" in medieval times through the Office of the Dead or the Book of Hours, the French play La Pacience de Job, or the fable of Griselda; the post-enlightenment thinkers who wrestled explicitly with the issue of theodicy and the theme of sublimity in Job, along with the artistic portrayals of the book done by Blake; and finally, the modern interpreters who employ text-critical methods to get "behind" the text, embracing a polyphony of voices within the fractured book they see Job to be, as well as modern 20th-century Jewish interpretation wrestling with life after the Shoah, particularly as expressed by Elie Wiesel.
Every chapter of the book was excellent, well-researched and clear. Larrimore begins by suggesting that we adopt the posture of one of Job's friends, coming to be with him as he experiences his suffering (and potentially trying to impose our own framework of understanding on his situation, which is how we might initially look at other eras of interpretation). Personally, I found the discussion of ancient midrashic interpreters, the exploration of other versions of the tale that have emerged throughout history (all of which offer a clearer and simpler kind of explanation for suffering than the book of Job), the medieval "enactments" of Job like the French play La Pacience de Job, the exploration of Blake's artwork and theology, and the 20th-century journey of Wiesel and the larger Jewish community in the interpretation of the book of Job to be the most informative and unique. Larrimore does a great job in approaching other eras of interpretation with humility and openness, and the range of what is covered in the book really does give the reader a very broad sense of the ways in which the book of Job has been read and interpreted.
Every chapter of the book was excellent, well-researched and clear. Larrimore begins by suggesting that we adopt the posture of one of Job's friends, coming to be with him as he experiences his suffering (and potentially trying to impose our own framework of understanding on his situation, which is how we might initially look at other eras of interpretation). Personally, I found the discussion of ancient midrashic interpreters, the exploration of other versions of the tale that have emerged throughout history (all of which offer a clearer and simpler kind of explanation for suffering than the book of Job), the medieval "enactments" of Job like the French play La Pacience de Job, the exploration of Blake's artwork and theology, and the 20th-century journey of Wiesel and the larger Jewish community in the interpretation of the book of Job to be the most informative and unique. Larrimore does a great job in approaching other eras of interpretation with humility and openness, and the range of what is covered in the book really does give the reader a very broad sense of the ways in which the book of Job has been read and interpreted.
January 26, 2014
This was a wonderful, informative look at one of my favorite biblical books - The book of Job. One of the most poetic, challenging, and distressing books of the Bible, the book of Job asks, "why do good people suffer?" The book has been cherished by Holocaust survivors, who see in Job a kindred spirit. Elie Wiesel famously lectured on Job for over thirty years, telling others that Job was right to put God on trial. His only disappointment in the book was that Job did not rebel enough. Early Christianity incorporated Job's laments into funeral services, finding Job's laments and curses echoes of humanity's own anxieties about death and suffering. In a secularized world, the Book of Job has even been lauded by atheists and humanists, who see in Job a righteous indignation against a cruel and unjust God. Larrimore brilliantly traces the history of the book while remaining respectful toward the many different interpretations, literal, figurative, new historical, etc. To me, Job is a beautiful book, one which offers condolences, but also says "it is OKAY to question the universe! and yes, bad things happen to good people and NO ONE KNOWS WHY!" This is not reason for despair but a reason to stand in awe at the mystery of the world and also to acknowledge the strange universality of suffering, pain, and grief. Larrimore's concluding thoughts sum up my own feelings well:
"In its jarring polyphony and in its silences, the book of Job speaks to and for the broken. In its protagonist's persistence, it speaks of hope even in the depths of despair. In its unfinalizability, it offers a shared project for sufferers and witnesses, and an outline of a community of care. As we continue the work of binding shattered lives and worlds into livable wholes, we will continue also to make books of Job."
"In its jarring polyphony and in its silences, the book of Job speaks to and for the broken. In its protagonist's persistence, it speaks of hope even in the depths of despair. In its unfinalizability, it offers a shared project for sufferers and witnesses, and an outline of a community of care. As we continue the work of binding shattered lives and worlds into livable wholes, we will continue also to make books of Job."
January 11, 2016
It’s hard to say if this book demands a close reading of the Biblical Book of Job before it’s read or, rather, it demands a close reading of that book after it’s read. Or both, which is the case for me. Like any good book, both this and the Biblical Job raise more questions than provide answers—in a good way. If you are in search of an explanation of evil, or why bad things happen to good people, you won’t find it here: questions, not answers. Seek and you won’t find...
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June 26, 2014Read Morton Merowitz's review for the Jewish Book Council.
December 20, 2013
A fantastic overview of one of the Bible's best books. The entire Princeton series is, almost without exception, outstanding, and this is one of the best of the bunch.
July 1, 2014
Job clarified from an historical viewpoint. Worth the effort for anyone searching for the concept of evil.
June 20, 2015
Brilliant book from a brilliant series.
April 1, 2025
excellent overview of how the Book of Job has been used historically
April 16, 2017
This is the most technically demanding book in the series that I have come across so far. The book of Job raises many questions and Larrimore complicates things even further.
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