Biblical Proportions
Unfortunately for the powerful, the plight of the biblical Job is a story
with perennial resonance. A man seemingly rich in the gifts life has to
offer, happy and blessed, finds himself -- unjustly, from his perspective
-- bereft. Protected and apparently invincible one day, he is buffeted
as God turns his back on his former beloved, producing rage, confusion
and self-pity. In the history of the American presidency, reversal happens
time and time again: Lyndon Johnson declining to run four years after his
landslide victory in 1964, George H. W. Bush losing re-election after
winning the Persian Gulf war of 1991, Bill Clinton in the 1994 midterms,
and now Barack Obama.
The connection between the trials of Job and the president's midterm
rebuke came to mind as I read what I think is the political book of the
season: THE WISDOM BOOKS: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes (Norton, $35),
a new translation and commentary by Robert Alter. A master translator of
Hebrew poetry, Alter previously rendered the Pentateuch and the Psalms
into affecting contemporary English, and has now turned his attention to
what he calls the most mysterious books in the Hebrew Bible.
The Wisdom books have a ''distinctive identity'' in the context of the
narrative of Scripture; there is, Alter writes, ''little . . . that is
specifically Israelite.'' Wisdom literature concerns itself with
questions both existential and moral: What is the nature of life, and how
are we to conduct ourselves as we go about living? These books are linked
to a broader, more universalist tradition in the ancient Near East.
Job and Ecclesiastes are especially atypical, for they are
philosophically bleak, asking unanswerable questions. In these books God
is great, but he is not necessarily good. Why do the innocent suffer and
die? Why are some rich, and others poor? Why are some hearts full, and
others perpetually broken? The replies are hardly the stuff of Sunday
school lessons. As Job says at one point:
Man born of woman, scant of days and sated with trouble, like a blossom
he comes forth and withers, and flees like a shadow -- he will not stay.
The texts make for illuminating reading in a season of widespread economic
pain and political upheaval. They should assuage the gloom of the defeated
and temper the joy of the victors. ''All is mere breath,'' says the
narrator of Ecclesiastes, adding, ''That which was is that which will be,
and that which was done is that which will be done, and there is nothing
new under the sun.''
Outside politics, President Obama thinks of himself less as a professor
or community organizer and more as a writer -- a man who observes reality,
interprets it internally, and then recasts it on the page in his own voice
and through his own eyes. And he is a reader of serious books.
Given that, he might find Alter's new book congenial. John Boehner is not
exactly a case of boils, but the president may feel differently at the
moment, and thus the story of Job could be of some use to him.
Like Obama, Job was once the highly favored one:
Would that I were as in moons of yore, as the days when God watched over
me, when he shined his lamp over my head. . . .
But the Lord withdraws his protection, inflicting pain and death and
misery on Job, who cries:
Terror rolls over me, pursues my path like the wind. . . . At night my
limbs are pierced, and my sinews know no rest. With great power he seizes
my garment, grabs hold of me at the collar. He hurls me into the muck,
and I become like dust and ashes.
God is having none of it. He will not be questioned by a mortal, even a
mortal whom he once loved and who has honored him. Fairly snarling, the
Lord taunts Job from a whirlwind: ''Where were you when I founded earth?
/ Tell, if you know understanding.''
Four brilliant, contemptuous chapters of the poetry of power follow this
sneering query -- or, more precisely, the poetry of God's power and man's
powerlessness. They are humbling verses, exhausting even. The reader
feels berated and beaten, the victim of a mighty torrent from a boastful,
cold, imperious God. (This is how Dick Cheney's vision of unfettered
executive power might sound if rendered in ancient Hebrew verse: The
Unilateralist in the Whirlwind.)
Job finally surrenders -- he has no other choice -- and humbles himself,
recanting his challenge and repenting in ''dust and ashes.'' With that,
God tries to make amends with gifts of livestock and new children, and
there is a telling line in this bittersweet ending. ''And all his male
and female kinfolk and all who had known him before came and broke bread
with him in his house and grieved with him and comforted him for all the
harm that the Lord had brought on him.''
Commiseration and communion, however fleeting, are thus given their place
in the human enterprise, a reminder that life on this side of the grave
is ultimately redeemable (and endurable) only through alliance and
affection.
The ethos of resignation that pervades Alter's translation is hardly
cheering. Ecclesiastes (Alter uses the Hebrew title Qohelet, from the root
q-h-l, which means ''to assemble,'' as in the assembling of an audience
to hear a philosophical discourse) in particular is all too eloquent and
convincing on the question of the provisional nature of life, advising
its readers to take comfort in the pleasures of the senses: ''There is
nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and sate himself with good
things through his toil.'' We associate such views more with pagan writers
than with biblical ones. Alter is unsparing in interpreting verses in all
their matter-of-factness about the limits of the human condition.
The Wisdom books force readers to face uncomfortable truths. ''There is
no remembrance of the first things nor of the last things that will be,''
says Ecclesiastes. In a footnote, Alter observes: ''This is a radical and
deeply disturbing idea for the Hebrew imagination, which, on the evidence
of many earlier texts, sets such great store in leaving a remembrance,
and envisages the wiping out of remembrance as an ultimate curse.''
And yet, and yet. All is not lost, which should give the president some
hope amid the shadows, and should keep the Republicans from thinking that
their own course will now be unimpeded. ''And I saw that wisdom surpasses
folly as light surpasses darkness,'' says Ecclesiastes. ''The wise man
has eyes in his head, and the fool goes in darkness.'' The world will never
bend itself totally to our purposes, but Job's example offers us some hope:
endure in tribulation, and perhaps all may be well.
DRAWINGS (DRAWING BY JOON MO KANG; WILLIAM BLAKE ENGRAVING FROM HULTON
ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES)
Late Edition - Final
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By JON MEACHAM