UNGODLY ABUSE:
JOB, HIS WIFE, AND THEIR GOD

Presented at the Pacific Northwest Meeting of the American Academy of Religion
Walla Walla College, May, 1992

 

Being faithful is the equivalent of being conquered and raped by divine power.
Elizabeth Bettenhausen, Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse

Divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and the child who suffers
without even raising a voice' is lauded as the hope of the world.
Joanne C. Browne & Rebecca Parker Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse

Were it not written in [Job] it would be impossible to say:
God is like a man whom someone tries to incite and who is in the end incited.
The Talmud

He blusters and bullies Job, never effectively answering Job's questions.
Such a God, Job seems to say, deserves to be blasphemed.
David Penchansky, The Betrayal of God

It is indeed no edifying spectacle to see how quickly Yahweh abandons his faithful servant
to the evil spirit and lets him fall without compunction or pity into the abyss of physical and moral suffering.
Carl Jung, Answer to Job

The character called 'the Lord' can do anything to him--have this daughter raped and mutilated,
send his sons to Auschwitz--and he will turn the other cheek. This is not a matter of
spiritual acquiescence, but of mere capitulation to an unjust, superior force.
Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job

        There are many forms of addiction: some people are hooked on drugs, others cannot get enough sex, and many are addicted to power. Power addicts are found in our families, our societies, and in our religions. I find it ironic that my students are eager to criticize Zeus and other pagan gods for their indignities and injustices, but fail to notice that Yahweh abuses his power as well. They reject pagan religion as immoral, but they do not apply the same critical reasoning to the stories of the Bible. If the story of Job were a Greek myth with Zeus playing the part of Yahweh, I am sure that my students would roundly condemn the actions of the Greek high god.

        Anna Case-Winters observes that in Judaism "power becomes a paraphrase of the divine names, a kind of euphemism for God."(1) In western religions, more so than in the East, divine power has been conceived in terms of absolute political power. In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity God is seen as a cosmic king, exerting sovereign and uncontested rule over the universe and everything in it. The author(s) of the Book of Job use the word "almighty" ('el shaddai) more than any other Hebrew author. Political terms such as pantokrator ("all-ruling"), sovereignty, and kingship dominate western descriptions of God. In his book Kingship of God Martin Buber argues that Yahweh is different from the other middle eastern gods in that he demands control in all areas of human life, not just the religious.

        Yahweh is a jealous God and he will tolerate no contenders for the rule of the universe. It is especially clear that Yahweh will not tolerate the existence of female deities. Many passages in the Hebrew scriptures imply a constant battle between Yahweh and the forces of watery chaos, most frequently portrayed in ancient religions as feminine in nature. Those irrational goddesses, however, will not bother us in the "new heaven and new earth," for it in "the sea [is] no more" (Rev. 21:1). It is significant that Job, who believes that God has unjustly made him an enemy, likens himself to a sea monster (7:11). In Genesis 1:1 Yahweh's original antagonist is "the deep (tehom)," a demythologized form and linguistic equivalent of Tiamat, a Babylonian she-dragon.

            Yahweh's addiction to raw power is so blind that his prophets sometimes have to rebuke and restrain him. Moses indicts Yahweh for doing evil to his people (Ex. 5:22). In Numbers 14:12 Yahweh throws a fit and decides to destroy the people of Israel, but Moses reminds him that he is supposed to be a just God and that he should reconsider. In Genesis 18 Abraham reminds Yahweh that he must always do the right and beseeches him to spare the innocent in Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham, as we all know, only manages to save Lot and his family. Moses, Joshua, and Saul thought they had acting judiciously in their military campaigns, but Yahweh's messengers remind them that his policy was to "utterly destroy all that breathed" (Num. 31; 1 Sam. 15; Jos. 10:40).

DIVINE MISBEHAVIOR: EAST AND WEST

            In ranking the divine attributes, the early church fathers placed divine omnipotence first, even before God's goodness or his omniscience. What we see in much western theology is an undisguised worship of raw, unadulterated power. This addiction to power has driven the patriarchal social and political systems that we still contend with today. Feminists are obviously correct that the social evils of general physical abuse and specific sexual abuse, including rape, are largely the result of this distortion of male power. Many western males have become addicted to power in the same way that Yahweh was.

            In the Asian religions it is rare to find God or the sacred described as raw power. In Indra and Varuna we can find Vedic equivalents of Yahweh, but these gods were replaced by more benevolent ones. It is true that some Buddhists worship their savior as a cosmic king, but most of them firmly reject such an idolatry of power. The Asian religions generally celebrate an internal spiritual power that is persuasive not coercive and aggressive in nature. There is one instructive exception in the portrayal of Krishna in the Mahabharata, and one story in particular offers some fascinating parallels to Job and his wife. In the Mahabharata Krishna is not, contrary to his popular reputation, a god of peace and compassion, but a deity who calls for war and leads his own clan and his relatives into total destruction. Arjuna, as is well known from the Bhagavad-gita, is not inclined to fight, but Krishna inists that he do his duty as a warrior. Later in the ensuing battle, Krishna tells Arjuna to break the rules of warfare and strike an enemy solider whose chariot is stuck in the mud.

        Another aspect of Krishna's plan is that Yudhishthira, the eldest and most pacifist of the Pandava brothers, should lose a game of dice, which leads to the humiliation of his wife Draupadi and the exile of his brothers. Job's wife demands that he curse God, but Draupadi does the deed herself: "As a man splits log with log, stone with stone, iron with iron--things that [of themselves] can neither move nor think--so does the Lord God, the Self-subsistent, the primal Grandshire, hurt one creature by means of another, establishing for himself an alibi. Joining things together only to disjoin them again the Lord acts at his own good pleasure, playing with his creatures as children play with dolls. He does not treat his creatures as a father or a mother would but acts in raging anger; and since he acts so, others follow his example."(2) Here is an indictment of God as severe as Job's, coming from the mouth of a woman. There is also certain truth in Draupadi's point that humans will model their behavior on the actions of their gods. Yudhishthira is shocked at his wife's blasphemy and defends Krishna in ways very similar to Job's friends. Finally, Gandhari, wife of the Kuru king Dhritarashtra, also curses Krishna for the destruction that he has wrought, and predicts that his tribe will also be destroyed and that he will fall, like Achilles, to an arrow to the ankle.(3)

            In Chinese religion one development during the Zhou dynasty is especially relevant to our topic. Tian became the Zhou kings' personal God and he vouched for the their virtue and guaranteed justice in the land. But when the Zhou dynasty began to fall apart in the 9th Century BCE, the people did not blame themselves or their kings, but accused Tian instead. The poets of the period were particularly harsh. Here is one who might be called the Chinese Job:

Oh, universal Tian,whom we call parent!
I am innocent and blameless,
Yet I suffer from such great disorders.
Majestic Heaven, you are too stern;
for truly I am innocent.
Majestic Heaven, you are too cruel;
for truly I am blameless?
(4)

As a result of complaints such as these, the Zou people deposed their god, and Tian did not have a revival until the time of Confucius.

        There is only one instance of the dismissal of deities in the Hebrew scriptures. This amazing event is found in Psalms 82. The scene is in heaven and Yahweh has called a meeting of his divine council--an "executive board" composed of subordinate deities. Presumably there is only one item on the day's agenda: reports that Yahweh's subordinates have been doing a very poor job of ruling their respective nations. Yahweh gives these unnamed gods no chance to defend themselves, and his judgment is swift and sure: "You are gods, sons of the most High, all of you. Nevertheless, you shall [now] die like men, and fall like any prince" (vv. 6-7). This heavenly drama may symbolize one of the most crucial events in Hebrew theological history. It represents the movement away from earlier forms of polytheism, or henotheism as this scene represents, to the full fledged monotheism of later Judaism.

        The story of Psalms 82 raises an obvious question: If the gods of the nations can be removed from office, why cannot the high God himself be charged with high crimes and misdemeanors? We ought to follow the lead of the courageous Draupadi and indict those gods who plays with their creatures arbitrarily and remove, as the wise Chinese did, these incompetent and abusive deities from office. Interestingly, we have Hindu and Chinese equivalents of Job's indictment of God; but instructively, they impeach their abusive deity, while Job finally submits to his. How is it that the Chinese and Indians manage to eliminate their dysfunctional deities, but we in the West persist in preserving ours?

SATAN AS A MASK OF GOD

        A bill of impeachment for Yahweh would contain many particulars, but I have chosen to focus on the Book of Job. According to the traditional interpretation of the story, the immediate defense would be that it is Satan, not Yahweh, who is the abusive one. George W. Rutler is representative of this view: "By introducing Satan, Job's author is able to make the Thomist case that the evil accomplished by creatures is known by God and yet God is absolutely not the cause of evil, neither directly or indirectly. God's granting permission to start the play is precisely that, permission, not cause."(5)

        Rutler is obviously not reading the text very carefully. Job, his wife, and his friends all impute his misfortunes to Yahweh alone; they do not acknowledge the complicity or even existence of Satan. It is Job who says: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and not receive evil, too?" (2:10); and in the end Job's brothers and sisters "comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him" (42:11). Furthermore, in the Muslim version of the story, God, not Satan, is testing Job, even though Satan approaches Job's wife to make a deal about Job's recovery.(6) (More on this later.)

        Following Hebraic theology, orthodox Christianity insists that all power resides in God and God alone, and the power of any agent, including Satan, is merely an extension of God's power.  (For more on divine power see www.uidaho.edu/ngier/3dp.htm.) In the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not a separate agent but simply one of the "masks" of God, as Martin Luther phrased it. "Satan," then, is just a title, not the name of a distinct evil power. Luther is the only major Christian theologian who supported this early Hebrew idea of Satan. Luther saw clearly the logic of divine omnipotence: "Since God moves and does all, we must take it that he moves and acts even in Satan and the godless."(7)

        In the Book of Job Satan has become a separate agent, and he appears to be one of the subordinate deities in Yahweh's divine council. In Zechariah Satan stands on the right hand of God as the "angel of the Lord" and his chief accuser (3:1ff.). He is Yahweh's prosecuting attorney, or when there has been no crime committed, as in the case of Job, he is Yahweh's agent provocateur. One scholar suggests that the role of Satan is modelled on the Persian secret service.(8) Even though the author separates God and Satan for dramatic effect, theologically he tells us that they are essentially the same cosmic power. It is Yahweh, not Satan, who "has torn me in his wrath, and hated me"; it is Yahweh, not Satan, who is "my adversary" (16:9). "Adversary" is of course the phrase used to identify Satan, so Luther was correct: Satan is just the dark and wrathful side of God himself. This is clear in the story of Balaam and his ass: "But God's anger was kindled because [Balaam] went; and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the way as his adversary" (Num. 22:22).

IRRELEVANCIES OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND

        Poor Job perseveres through the lost of his children, his worldly goods, his health, and the accusations of his friends. He demands that Yahweh give him an explanation for his suffering, and Yahweh finally responds with his famous speech out of the whirlwind. One scholar describes Yahweh's answer as a "magnificent irrelevance" and another says that it is "not [a] response to Job's cry for vindication or. . .an endorsement of Job's innocence. . . but a series of ironical questions that make Job's questions irrelevant."(9)A conservative evangelical writer is just as candid: "This explains the apparently unsatisfactory climax in which God does not answer Job's questions or charges, but though he proclaims the greatness of his all-might, not his ethical rule, Job is satisfied."(10) In other words, Yahweh proves his omnipotence, but not his goodness.

        These are correct and honest assessments of Yahweh's nonanswer to Job. Yahweh's speech from the whirlwind is a display of raw cosmic power, peppered with pointless questions to Job, such as "where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth" (38:4)? Yahweh also awes Job with his wonderful and odd creatures, but what, as Job's wife passionately objects in the companion piece, does that have to do with Job's indictment? In short, Yahweh's answer to Job is evasive, defensive, and insultingly irrelevant. Edwin M. Cook states that "Job always knew that the god was powerful. It is not clear that he has learned anything new, except that the god can also be arrogantly sarcastic."(11)

        The traditional defense of Yahweh's answer out of the whirlwind is that he is simply reaffirming his divine prerogatives. Job is a mere creature, and he has no right to judge God, the creator and sovereign ruler of the universe. One of God's prerogatives presumably is the right to use his creatures in any way, including testing their faith. Would those who accept this line of argument also allow this type of behavior in their families and societies? We might have condoned this centuries ago--most likely using Yahweh as a model--but not today. Yahweh's answer is too much like the patriarch's: "I am your father; I brought you into the world; and you will do as I say." Most of us have rejected this as a distortion of parental power, so we must reject Job's God for the same reason.

        Let us now make up a contemporary example for comparison's sake. In frequent fits of rage a man beats his wife and children. After every incident, the man apologizes profusely, repents of his deeds, and promises never to do it again. As a token of his resolve, he buys his family lavish gifts. Every time the family accepts his apologies and his promises, but he continues to repeat his behavior. The man is obviously addicted to his abusive behavior and his family is, as some people phrase it, codependent upon it. There is one crucial and obvious difference between this scenario and the story of Job. Yahweh does restore children and stock, but he does not apologize; he does not repent; he does not give a justification for his behavior.

        Does being God mean that you never have to say you are sorry? This cannot be it, for Yahweh does regret that he created humans (Gen. 6:6), he repents twice in his conversations with Amos (7:1-6), and he repents of the evil that he had planned to inflict on Jerusalem (2 Sam. 24:16). So why is the Lord so adamant with regard to Job's situation? On the face of the text, it appears that Yahweh has no reason to persecute Job. Speaking to Satan, he admits that "you (Satan) moved me against him, to destroy him without cause" (2:3). Please note who is doing the moving against Job: it is not Satan; it is Yahweh himself. Yahweh does not say: "I allowed you, Satan, on your own power, to move against Job"; instead he says: "You persuaded me to move against Job."

        In his article "In Defense of God the Sage," Norman C. Habel proposes that the author of Job, a representative of the Wisdom tradition, subtly displaces the interventionist warrior God of the Pentateuch with "God the Sage."(12) Agreeing with Edwin Cook's appraisal that the author of Job has rejected divine retribution and has separated moral quality and external circumstance,(13) Habel says that a divine sage only rules by general, not special, providence. On this basis Habel then defends Yahweh's whirlwind speeches as a revelation of a God who rules the natural universe and does not intervene in the particulars of human affairs. Human beings like Job can acquire wisdom, a faculty of discernment that critically observes, as Qoheleth tells us, all things "under heaven" (Eccles. 1:14). Because of his distress Job is tempted to indict God as 'el gibbor, the interventionist warrior god. The true God of Wisdom answers from the whirlwind and reminds Job of the amoral cosmic ecology. In the end Job is not so much humbled as he is reaffirmed in his wisdom theology. This interpretation is ingenious and possibly correct, but it cannot reconcile the problem of Job's God within normative Christianity and common piety, both wedded to the idea of an interventionist God of history.

JOB REBELLIOUS VS. JOB SUBMISSIVE

        For decades scholars have noticed the marked differences between the folktale "frame" and the poetic "center" of the book. Some have even argued that these disparate parts must have been written by two different authors. In his book The Betrayal of God: Ideological Conflict in Job, David Penchansky argues that some brilliant poet deliberately subverted the orthodox theology of the basic story.(14) In the prologue Job displays a neurotic piety (e.g., he sacrifices secretly for his sons) and complete submission to God's will. But the Job of the poetry maintains his integrity and challenges Yahweh. The pious Job refuses to curse God, but the Promethean Job does everything short of a formal curse.

        Itemizing the actions of the latter, one commentator states: "Within these. . . chapters of Job's speeches can be found examples of some of the most anti-Yahwist sentiments of which we have any record in literature."(15) Another scholar summarizes Job's indictment of Yahweh as follows: God is a capricious tyrant (9:18-19), a corrupt judge (9:20-29), a wild beast that has torn his flesh (16:7-9), and a ruthless warrior (6:4,9; 16:12-14; 19:18-19).(16) As Ernst Bloch once said: "It is Yahweh who is on the defensive, thrust back by the most poserful attacks on his righteousness."(17)

        Penchansky and others have shown that the orthodox view of Job's restoration is false. Job is rewarded not for his piety, as tradition would have it, but for his integrity. Job maintains his integrity in the poetic center by speaking honestly before God, even if it means accusing him of injustice. If Job is restored because of his piety, then Yahweh's condemnation of the friends at the end makes no sense whatsoever. Bruce Vawter's provocative conclusion must be true: "Job is being praised for having berated the Lord, challenged him, satirized him, dared him, spurned him."(18) David Robertson is just as compelling: "God's praise of Job amounts to a terrible self-incrimination. . . God is the object of an ironic joke."(19)

        Abusive persons have no respect for those, like Job's friends, who temporize and rationalize violent behavior, but it has utmost respect for those who stand up to them. Christian Duquoc says that Yahweh "is more honored by the impatience and revolt of Job than by the adulation of the 'friends' who recognize the designs of providence where God himself says he sees no such thing."(20) Stephen Mitchell believes that Job is liberated by his blasphemy, and that his final words do not mean pious submission; rather, they constitute a savvy surrender to a superior force.(21)

GIVING JOB'S WIFE A VOICE

        And what about Job's wife? She is the first to stand up to Yahweh with her famous "Curse God and die!" Is it possible that she provided the inspiration for Job's new found courage? Nothing prevents us from answering in the affirmative. If a later poet changed the story for his purposes, we can surely subvert the story once again for ours. The poet who did violence to the folktale did so because his religious tradition was not working for him. The women who today do violence to the traditional Christian story are doing it for exactly the same reason.

        The sexist author does not even give Job's wife a name, although later rabbis thought she was called Dinah. Muslim commentators thought that she was either Rahmat, the daughter of Joseph's son Ephraim, or Makhir, the daughter of Manasses.(22) According to the Koran, Job's wife miraculously regains her youth and bears Job 28 sons. The Masoretic text spares her this burden and has her giving birth to only ten more children. Stephen Mitchell believes that there is a hint of a more egalitarian world after the restoration. Although they are still valued for their beauty, Job's new daughters have names, but the sons do not; and they get a share of Job's inheritance.(23)

        The Muslim account contains wife abuse as well. While Job is sitting on his ash heap, defending himself against his friends, Rahmat is out trying to make a living. (The Septuagint has her "drudg[ing] from place to place" and the apocryphal Testament of Job has her offering her own hair, a Hebrew woman's most precious possession, for a loaf of bread.) The devil appears to her and says that he will restore all that they had lost if she would only worship him. Rahmat goes straight to Job, explains the arrangement, and he flies into a rage vowing to whip her 100 times if he does in fact recover. When God does restore Job's fortune he instructs Job to strike his wife once with a palm branch having a hundred leaves.(24) Here Yahweh appears, to his credit, to be more lenient than his mortal counterpart.

        One contemporary portrayal of Job's wife accompanies this article, so let us now turn to Archibald MacLeish's Pulitzer winning play J. B. for an equally compelling view. MacLeish calls Job's wife "Sarah" and he gives her a particularly strong voice. Here are the crucial bits of dialogue, which come after all the children are dead:

J. B.: (a whisper) God, let me die!

Sarah: (her voice dead) You think He'd help you even to that? God is our enemy.

J. B.: No. . .No. . .No. . .Don't say that Sarah! . . .

J. B.: God will not punish without cause. God is just.

Sarah: (hysterically) God is just! If God is just our slaughtered children stank with sin, were rotten with it! Oh, my dear! my dear! my dear! Does God demand deception of us?--Purchase his innocence by ours? Must we be guilty for Him? . . .

J. B. He knows the guilt is mine. He must know: Has He not punished it? . . .

Sarah: I will not stay here if you lie--Connive in your destruction, cringe to it: Not if you betray my children. . .I will not stay to listen. They are dead and they were innocent: I will not let you sacrifice their deaths to make injustice justice and God good!. . . If you buy quiet with their innocence--theirs or yours. . .I will not love you.

J. B.: I have no choice but to be guilty.

Sarah: We have the choice to live or die, all of us. . . curse God and die. . . .(25)

She then walks out! Here is a woman telling the man she loves that his submissive position is absurd and self-defeating. Here is a strong woman who refuses to be a codependent like her husband. She refuses to compromise with the one who is addicted, and she avoids rationalizing the abusive behavior.

        MacLeish offers us an instructive reversal. It is usually the woman who plays J. B.'s role, the one, who in the face of abuse, continues to insist that she must deserve the beatings she receives. The editors of Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse observe that the reasons women give for staying in a religion based on abuse are the same that women give who continue in violent marriages.(26) The Catholic bishops keep repeating that women cannot become priests because they cannot "image" Jesus. But from the beginning, Christian women have been "imaging" Jesus in what feminists would say are the most destructive ways. Few Christian men have ever been held to the ideal of agapé, but all Christian women have been expected to fulfill its impossible conditions.

        In a 1959 review of J. B., Job scholar Samuel Terrien pinpoints the main weakness of MacLeish's play: he completely ignores the Promethean Job and casts J. B. in the role of the pious codependent. While Terrien scores a debating point here, I believe that he misunderstands Sarah's role. (It is to Terrien's credit that he mentions Sarah at all. The other reviewers I read virtually ignore her.) Rather than focus on her courageous stand against an abusive God, Terrien instead praises her for returning to J.B. at the end. He further degrades her role by claiming that her love for J. B. cannot substitute for the true love of God. Sarah's love, says Terrien, "is still bound by despair."(27) According to Terrien, love can have meaning only within the context of hope, and only an omnipotent God can provide that framework. Terrien argues that "because J. B. is not a rebel, the intervention of the Lord speaking from the whirlwind appears . . . as the irony of love which creates faith. . . ."(28)

        Along with other commentators, I fail to find any expression of love, ironic or otherwise, in Yahweh's speech, let alone grounds for faith. Instead, we find what Terrien accuses MacLeish of creating: "a manifestation of impersonal and senseless power which produces in man only abject resignation." We must reject Terrien's non sequitur that Yahweh's self-disclosure in the whirlwind somehow reveals a God "who is infinitely concerned for the suffering of humanity."(29) If Mitchell is right that Job does not submit to a loving God, but surrenders to a cosmic bully; and if others are correct in saying that Job is restored for standing up to this abuse, then Terrien's traditional reading is groundless. We must conclude that the poetic Job refuses to accept his suffering as the sign of a faithful and loving God, and that his wife may have well aided him in this insight.

        Although Job is mentioned only once in the New Testament, many have seen his suffering as a prefiguration of the Passion of Christ. If this traditional view is correct, it means that the ungodly abuse of Job is perpetuated in the Christian tradition. "Divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and the child who suffers 'without even raising a voice' is lauded as the hope of the world."(30) An alternative analysis of the Book of Job, however, has uncovered the possibility of Promethean Job, who does not compromise his integrity and who does not validate his deity's outrageous abuse of power. As Edwin Good states: "Job thumbs his nose at the deity and proclaims. . . that justice will win out in the universe, even if it entails the dethroning of the god."(31)

ENDNOTES

1. Anna Case-Winters, God's Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), p. 27.

2. Mahabharata 3.31.34-7, trans. R. C. Zaehner, Concordant Discord (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 177.

3. Mahabharata 11.25.40-1 in ibid., p. 183.

4. Book of Poetry, Shih, 2:5, 4, quoted in Chieu, The Tao of Chinese Religion (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1984), p. 28.

5. George W. Rutler, The Impatience of Job (La Salle: Sherwood & Sugden, 1981), p. 108.

6. See Marvin H. Pope, The Anchor Bible: Job (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 23.

7. Luther's Works (Weimarausgabe), vol. 18, p. 709.

8. See Pope, op. cit., p. 10.

9. Ibid., p. lxxxi; Bernard W. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1957), p. 495.

10. The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), p. 637. Italics added.

11. Edwin M. Cook, "The Problem of Evil in the Book of Job" in The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, ed. Leo G. Perdue and W. Clark Gilpin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), p. 66.

12. Norman C. Habel, "In Defense of God the Sage" in The Voice from the Whirlwind, pp. 21-39.

13. Cook, op. cit., p. 69.

14. David Penchansky, The Betrayal of God: Ideological Conflict in Job (Louisville: John Knox/Westminster Press, 1990).

15. Robert M. Polzin, Biblical Structuralism: Method and Subjectivity in the Study of Ancient Texts (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), p. 184.

16. Samuel Terrien, "The Book of Job: Introduction and Exegesis" in The Interpreter's Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1954), vol. 3, p. 889.

17. Ernst Bloch, Atheism and Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), p. 107.

18. Bruce Vawter, Job and Jonah: Questioning the Hidden God (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), p. 85.

19. David Robertson, The Old Testament and the Literary Critic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), p. 53.

20. Christian Duquoc, "Demonism and the Unexpectedness of God" in Job and the Silence of God, eds. Duquoc and Casiano Floristan (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1983), p. 86.

21. Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), p. xxv.

22. See Pope, op. cit., pp. 22-23.

23. Mitchell, op. cit., pp. xvi-vii.

24. Ibid., p. 23.

25. Archibald MacLeish, J. B. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), pp. 101-102; 109-110.

26. Joanne Carlson Browne and Carole R. Bohn, eds., Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1989), p. 3.

27. Samuel Terrien, "J. B. and Job," The Christian Century (January 7, 1959), p. 11.

28. Ibid., p. 10.

29. Ibid., p. 11.

30. Browne and Parker, "Introduction" to Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse.

31. Cook, op. cit., p. 65. Cook admits that there is a less harsh way of reading these passages.