The ‘scrapheap’ Job -- #320

[July 2006 journal entry]

The short version of the story/play -- i.e., prologue plus the epilogue in the last paragraph of the text (42:10-17) -- stands on its own as a separate composition. The section with the intense exchanges between the ‘scrapheap’ Job and his three close friends (chs. 3-32) also stands on its own as a separate composition that openly and antithetically challenges the short version of the story/play. The whirlwind section -- perhaps including the Elihu speeches, but definitely including the 42:7-9 paragraph -- stands on its own as a separate composition. If the whirlwind ‘God’ is the narrator’s proposal re ‘God’, it seems to me:

• the narrator recognizes the simplistic form of the story/play preferred within the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm is severely damaged/discredited by the heated exchanges between the ‘scrapheap’ Job and his three close friends;
  
  
• the narrator’s whirlwind ‘God’ remains within the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm (being anchored by appeal to the sheer sovereignty of ‘God’), but now minus the (D)euteronomic reduction of human experience to a ‘righteous are blessed and unrighteous are cursed’ equation;
  
  
• the narrator’s whirlwind alternative to the simplistic theology common to the ‘religious’ T/O paradigm is somewhat analogous to the shift from the Homeric stories of the gods to Greek philosophy (from Socrates through Zeno);
  
  
• the narrator’s whirlwind ‘God’ undercuts the radical (i.e., to the root) ‘scrapheap’ insights of Job.