The Job Poet and the Order of Things
The writer responsible for Job is the greatest of all biblical poets and one of the most remarkable poets who flourished in any language in the ancient Mediterranean world. He is a technical virtuoso, deftly marshaling sound and rhythm for expressive effects, at times deploying brilliant word-play — as when he writes, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, / they snap off without any hope,” the word for “hope,” tiqwah, punning on a homonym that means “thread” — utilizing a vocabulary that is the most extensive of any biblical poet, with borrowings from Aramaic, an enlisting of rare words, and even introducing words that seem to be his own invention. His range of metaphors is inventive and often dazzling, drawing on cheese-making, weaving, horticulture, and much more. Had there been bicycles in ancient Israel, I suspect we would find a bicycle simile somewhere in his poem. He exhibits an interest in nature quite untypical of biblical poets. And no other poet of his time and place possessed his ability to link together different passages with recurrent terms and images, even over long stretches of text.
We know nothing about this anonymous heterodox genius except that he probably lived in the fifth century B.C.E., and even that has been disputed. In the fluidity of forms that characterized the Late Biblical Period, it would certainly have been possible for him to frame his argument as prose, but poetry was an inevitable choice for him. The power of poetic expression gave him the means to articulate the full measure of Job’s anguish and of his outrage at having been severely mistreated by God, as well as conveying the dizzying span of God’s vision of the created world in the Voice from the Whirlwind at the end. And one should also say that he surely knew he had a mastery of the poetic medium and relished its deployment in the great work he produced.
The outlook of the Job poet is a radical dissent from the mainstream biblical consensus, and in this regard, too, poetry was a powerful vehicle for him to express his dissent. In what follows here, I will be examining two rather long passages, the first a complete poem, in order to show how the resources of poetry enabled him to say what he wanted to say.
The Job poet strategically frames his poetic argument by beginning with a harrowing death-wish poem that communicates Job’s acute sense that his existence has become so unbearable — all his children dead, his property in flocks destroyed, his body afflicted with an excruciating burning rash — that he wishes he never would have been born. Here is the poem that takes up all of chapter three. (This and all the excerpts that follow are my translation.)
Annul the day that I was born
And the night that said, “A man is conceived.”
That day, let it be darkness.
Let God above not seek it out,
nor brightness shine upon it.
Let a cloud-mass rest upon it,
Let day-gloom dismay it.
That night, let murk overtake it.
Let it not join in the days of the year,
let it not enter the number of months.
Oh, let that night be barren,
let it have no song of joy.
Let the day-cursers hex it,
those ready to rouse Leviathan.
Let its twilight stars go dark.
Let it hope for day in vain,
and let it not see the eyelids of dawn.
For it did not shut the belly’s doors
to hide wretchedness from my eyes.
Why did I not die from the womb,
from the belly come out, breathe my last?
Why did knees welcome me,
and why breasts, that I should suck?
For now I would lie and be still,
and would sleep and know repose
with kings and the councilors of earth,
who build ruins for themselves,
or with princes, possessors of gold,
who fill their houses with silver.
Or like a buried stillborn I’d be,
like babes who never saw light.
There the wicked cease their troubling,
and there the weary repose.
All together the prisoners are tranquil,
they hear not the taskmaster’s voice.
The small and the great are there,
and the slave is free of his master.
Why give light to the wretched
and life to the deeply embittered,
who wait for death in vain,
dig for it more than treasure.
who rejoice at the tomb,
are glad when they find the grave?
To a man whose way is hidden,
and God has hedged him about.
For before my bread my moaning comes,
and my roar pours out like water.
For I feared a thing — it befell me,
what I dreaded came upon me.
I was not quiet, I was not still,
I had no repose, and trouble came.
The first word of the poem, yo’vad, literally means “perish,” but unfortunately “perish the day” is no longer a viable English equivalent because the locution in our era has slid into prissiness (“perish the thought”). The effort of a couple of modern translators to give the expression punch in English (“damn the day”) inserts an inappropriate tone or implication because there is nothing about damning, in either the invective or theological sense, in the Hebrew. The transitive verb “annul” has the justification that the poem is all about expunging the day from the calendar. The two versets of this line exhibit an altogether original use of the dynamic of intensification from the first verset to the second. Job wishes not merely never to have been born but, moving back nine months, never to have been conceived. Thus the conventional poetic word-pair, “day” and then “night,” is given a startling new force.
The poet then picks up “night” from the second half of this line and launches on a rich orchestration of synonyms for darkness. After the primary term “darkness,” he enlists “cloud-mass,” “day-gloom,” “murk.” (“Day-gloom,” kimrirei yom, seems to be his coinage, probably derived from an Aramaic root that indicates darkness, with the expression here possibly referring to a solar eclipse.) The poet’s tapping of the Hebrew lexicon for synonyms is evident throughout the book. (There are five different terms for “lion” in biblical Hebrew, and at one point he uses all five in two consecutive lines.) With elegant appropriateness, Job in this poem wants the night of his conception to have been “barren,” of course the opposite of conception.
In the process of intensification as the poem continues, he then moves up to a mythological register: “Let the day-cursers hex it, / those ready to rouse Leviathan.” A minor emendation to the Masoretic text yields “Yamm,” the primordial sea-god who is also Leviathan, instead of yom, “day.” (At this point, the King James Version commits one of its most lamentable errors, rendering the Hebrew for Leviathan, lewayatan, as “their mourning,” which is both grammatically wrong and imagines that the noun is lewayah, a term for “funeral” in rabbinic Hebrew that is not biblical.) The second line in this verse makes the wish for darkness cosmic, still another aspect of intensification — no stars, a night without dawn, without morning stars. The concluding metaphor of this line demonstrates how utterly original the Job poet is in his deployment of figurative language: “let it not see the eyelids of dawn.”
This is a daring, and beautiful, metaphor: the first crack of light on the eastern horizon is likened to the opening eyelids of the sleeper looking out to the east. Modern translators, deluded in thinking that readers can no longer understand metaphors, substitute for the metaphor what may be its referent, as in the Jewish Publication Society’s “the glimmerings of the dawn.” The Job poet knew that this was a remarkable metaphor, for he did not hesitate to use it again. This occurs much later, in a radically different context, in representing the fierce appearance of the daunting Leviathan, thus locating beauty at the heart of terror: “His sneezes shoot out light, / and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn” (41:10).
The initial movement of the death-wish poem heads toward a conclusion by Job’s saying of the day he was born that it “did not shut the belly’s doors / to hide wretchedness from my eyes.” The prominent noun in the last phrase is a strong instance of poetic efficiency. We might expect here “life” or “the light,” but for this sufferer life itself has become nothing but wretchedness. In the next few lines, following the characteristic movement of biblical poetry from the general to the specific or concrete, we get an evocation of the physicality of birth: womb, belly, knees (presumably parted in birthing), and breasts giving suck.
Job’s wish never to have been born joins with a panorama of human life, and it is a bleak panorama. Kings “build ruins for themselves,” imposing structures that inevitably crumble to dust (one thinks of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”) and princes store up gold and silver, futilely, for they will part from it in death. Verse 18 shows the poet’s firm sense of integrated structure, of which we will see a more spectacular instance in the Voice from the Whirlwind, for “babes who never saw light” takes us back to the early lines expressing the wish to be a stillborn and blot out the light. Everyone, in this despairing vision, finds repose only in death, the great equalizer. And what has life been for humankind? The wicked have troubled others, all are weary, there are prisoners and slaves and taskmasters. Existence is so universally miserable that everyone longs for death. In this way, Job invites us to see his wretchedness not as a special case but merely as a particular instance of the fate of misery shared by all. The large resonance of Job’s inveighing against God as he proceeds in his poetic argument derives from his seeing unwarranted suffering not as his alone but as the common plight of humankind.
A single word toward the end of this poem exemplifies how this writer creates connective links in the overall structure of his work. In the frame-story, the Adversary says to God, “Have you not hedged him about and his household and all that he has all around?” (1:10). The verb here obviously has the sense of “protected.” But the same word in Job’s mouth here, “and God has hedged him about” means the opposite: Job is complaining that God has blocked him on all sides and left him no way out of his terrible plight. This sharp play on two opposed meanings of the same word might suggest that the Job poet did not transcribe verbatim the old folktale that had come down to him, probably orally, but felt free at least at one point and perhaps others to modify a wording. Alternatively, the folktale may have included “hedge,” which the poet then played against. That same verb will occur twice more in the Voice from the Whirlwind, with still a third meaning, but I will postpone commenting on its use there until we have a long look at the God speech that concludes the poetic body of the book.
The final lines of the death-wish poem aptly round off its argument. The third line before the end exhibits the expected biblical intensification from verset to verset: “For before my bread my moaning comes, / and my roar pours out like water,” from moaning to roaring. Job goes on to assert that he had lived in a state of anxiety, perhaps intimated in his offering sacrifices for his children because he was afraid that they had committed some offense. Finally, having longed for the quiet of the grave, he admits the realization of those fears. The last word of the Hebrew text is rogez, etymologically a state of disturbance or unrest, as this same verbal stem is used elsewhere to describe the shaking of earthquakes.
The devastating extremity of Job’s wish for non-being raises a general issue. It serves the obvious purpose of introducing all that he will say by making clear how utterly unbearable his suffering is. He does not yet indict God, though that will follow, for he never ceases to believe in an all-powerful God, which means that God must be responsible for the chain of disasters inflicted upon him. But what good can poetry do in the face of intolerable and unwarranted suffering? The Job poet is clearly not alone in confronting this dilemma. In English literature, perhaps the most memorable instance is Lear driven out on the moor in the fierce storm, blinded, stripped of his possessions, cruelly rejected by two of his three daughters: “For I am bound upon a wheel of fire, / that mine own tears do scald like molten lead.” The Job poet would have appreciated this figurative language, especially the way the wheel of fire is extended in the simile of the scalding tears like molten lead.
In our own time, the signal instance of poetry conveying unbearable suffering may well be Paul Celan’s celebrated Todesfuge, or “Deathfugue.” It is a formally deft and beautifully crafted poem, but it embodies “a terrible beauty,” in Yeats’ phrase. The first two words, repeated as a kind of refrain, are a shock: “black milk.” The violent transformation of the nurturing substance of life into blackness will then work in tandem with another refrain-phrase, “Death is a master from Deutschland.” Celan exploits the resources of poetry to express the unspeakable outrage of six million of his people murdered in the industrial death-machine of Deutschland, the cherished homeland figured in the poem by the fair Margarete. What, in confronting such appalling realities, can poetry possibly do? The reflexive response to outrage against our moral instincts is, I suppose, a scream. Poetry of this order of greatness, from Job to Celan, transforms the scream into articulated, eloquent expression. I do not believe that it is really cathartic, but it communicates a feeling that suffering has been endowed with a sharp focus in language, the primary human medium — that outrage has been given a voice, a voice that gets across the full awfulness of what has occurred and therefore is, strangely, at once horrifying and satisfying. We somehow cling to our humanity in the face of horror.
As the great poem of Job unfolds, it emerges that the work incorporates three different orders of poetry. Most prominent, until a new poetic voice appears at the end, is Job’s poetry. The poetry of the three comforters in the debate is by and large inferior to his. It is inferior because they are working with the complacent clichés of traditional wisdom, and so the poetry that they speak in their argument invokes many shopworn formulas. From time to time, to be sure, there are brief passages of strong poetry, because this writer was such a fine poet that he could scarcely refrain from intermittently giving the comforters a few good lines. Finally, when we come to the conclusion of the poetic body of the work, the poet takes a certain risk, at which he succeeds splendidly.
God is now, at last, speaking, and because He is God, He must be given poetry that transcends the stunning poetry of anguish spoken by Job. It is a challenge that the Job poet undertakes because he must have been confident in his own mastery. If I may propose a seemingly irreverent analogy, let me cite Molly Bloom’s soliloquy that is the concluding episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. She has been a looming presence in the novel, especially in her husband’s thoughts, as we are taken through a rich variety of remarkable prose-poetry, some of it stream of consciousness and some of it in other forms. Then, at the end, we enter the living current of her unspoken words as she lies in bed, mulling over the day, her husband, her loves, her life, and this soliloquy proves to be prose-poetry arguably even greater than all that has come before. Like the Voice from the Whirlwind, it is poetic language that embodies a grand epiphany, the resonant affirmation that the work as a whole is meant to pronounce.
God’s poem begins with a challenge to Job: “Who is this who darkens counsel / in words without knowledge?” The initial phrase demonstrates how aptly this poet chooses his words. “Darken counsel” is not an idiom that appears elsewhere in the Bible, and so it evidently has been coined for the present purpose. Job’s first poem, as we saw, begins with a whole sequence of images that express a longing to blot out the light — daylight, the rising sun, the stars, all things to be engulfed by darkness. In response, God signals in the very phrasing that this is profoundly misguided. After a line in which He tells Job to gird his loins like a man, God continues:
Where were you when I founded earth?
Tell, if you know understanding.
In what were its sockets sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together,
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Who hedged the sea with double doors,
when it gushed forth from the womb,
when I made clouds its clothing,
and thick mists its swaddling bands?
I made breakers upon it My limit,
and set a bolt with double doors.
And I said, “Thus far come, no farther,
here halt the surge of your waves.”
Have you ever commanded the morning,
appointed dawn to its place,
to seize the earth’s corners,
that the wicked be shaken from it?
It turns like sealing clay,
takes color like a garment,
and their light is withdrawn from the wicked,
and the upraised arm is broken.
Have you ever come into the springs of the sea,
in the bottommost deep walked about?
Have the gates of death been laid bare to you,
and the gates of death’s shadow have you seen?
Did you take in the breadth of the earth?
Tell, if you know it all.
Where is the way that light dwells,
and darkness, where is its place,
that you might take it to its home
and understand the paths to its house?
Have you come into the storehouse of snow,
the storehouse of hail have you seen,
which I keep for a time of strife,
for a day of battle and war?
By what way does the west wind fan out,
the east wind whip over the earth?
Who split a channel for the torrent,
and a way for the thunderstorm,
to rain on a land without man,
wilderness bare of humankind,
to sate the desolate dunes,
and make the grass sprout there?
Does the rain have a father.
or who begot the drops of dew?
From whose belly did the ice come forth,
to the frost of the heavens who gave birth?
Water congeals like stone,
and the face of the deep locks hard.
The arresting image of the morning stars singing together in joy singles out these points of light in the night sky, heralding a dawn that Job had wished never would have come, and there are more references to light further on. This is an imagining of creation not hinted at in Genesis, though we do not know whether it is the poet’s original invention or reflects a tradition about creation that did not make it into the text of Genesis on which he drew. In the next line, we get the sea “hedged” with double doors. That verb, we recall, occurred in two different senses in the frame story and in the death-wish poem. Now, the idea that it conveys in this moment of cosmogony is a blocking of the surging waters of the sea from flooding the land. That notion is inherited from Canaanite poetry, where it is accompanied by the mythological motif of the conquest and imprisonment of a monstrous sea-god, variously called Yamm, Leviathan, Rahab, Tanin (the last also refers to lesser sea-beasts), affected by the land-god (or weather-god) Baal. This old story was so familiar in the culture that Job could invoke it without explanation to signify God’s holding him captive under relentless surveillance: “Am I Yamm, or the Sea-Beast [tanin], / that You should put a watch upon me?” (7:12).
The explicitly mythological figure is excluded from the representation here. Instead, we witness the waters gushing forth from the “womb” of the primordial sea, an image for it invented by the Job poet. This strategically chosen metaphor thus represents creation as birth, the very thing Job wanted to cancel in his death-wish. Birth is confirmed in the following line: “when I made cloud its clothing, / and thick mist its swaddling bands.” This is a metaphorical coinage of the same level of originality as Shakespeare’s scalding tears of molten lead. In the ancient world, infants were wrapped snugly in swaddling bands, strips of white linen. These are like what one might see looking out to the west at bands of mist over the water. The strikingly visual image is completely unusual while it continues the figuration of creation as birth.
Verses 17–20 further develop the rejoinder to Job’s initial bleak poem: “Have the gates of death been laid before you, / and the gates of death’s shadow have you seen?” Job had fervently wished for death but knew nothing of its looming reality. God alone is the master of death, His all-seeing eyes taking in the full measure of its dark realm. The next two verses underscore the antithesis to chapter three: “Where is the way that light dwells, / and darkness where is its place / that you might take it to its home / and understand the paths to its house?” Light appears here in poetic parallelism with darkness, as it does elsewhere in the Bible, but that appearance is diametrically opposed to Job’s desire for light to be swallowed up by darkness. Instead, there is a diurnal rhythm of alternation between light and darkness — and just possibly, by implication, between hope and despair. Light and darkness are part of the harmonious ongoing process of the created world, something the devastated Job has chosen to turn away from.
What follows in the poem is a manifestation of the powerful, at times even violent, energy that pulses through creation, a theme that will continue through this poem all the way down to Behemoth and Leviathan at the end. This might be the relevance at this point in the mythological reference to God’s setting aside the harsh elements as weapons “for a time of strife, for a day of battle and war.” The face of nature itself is limned with violent action — “who split apart the channel for the torrent, / and a way for the thunderstorm.”
At this junction, the poet introduces a crucial, and radical, idea: God brings “rain on a land without man, / wilderness bare of humankind, // to sate the desolate dunes / and make the grass sprout there.” The version of cosmogony in Genesis is emphatically anthropocentric. Man is the culmination of creation, enjoined to rule over all things, everything set out for his benefit. Here, by contrast, God causes the rain to fall “on a land without man,” a rainfall that will “sate the desolate dunes.” (The poet’s mastery of sound as well as metaphor is evident in these words: “desolate dunes” represents the Hebrew sho’ah umesho’ah, that alliteration merely approximated in my English phrase.) This dissenting notion that the natural world extends far beyond man and is perhaps indifferent to him surely resonated with Melville in Moby-Dick, perhaps as much as Job’s Leviathan, which the novelist chose to construe as a great whale.
Finally, in the next lines, the poem returns to the birth imagery prominent at the beginning:
Does the rain have a father,
or who begot the drops of dew?
From whose belly did the ice come forth,
to the frost of the heavens who gave birth?
The second line here demonstrates both the originality and the boldness of this poet in his handling of metaphor. Having chosen to figure the origins of ice and dew as a birth, he represents that birth in a way that is almost shocking when he invites us to contemplate chunks of ice emerging from the womb. Poetry can be a means of reorienting or radically shifting perception, especially in conjoining through figurative language totally disparate and surprising ideas or realms. This is clearly what God wants to do with Job — to shake him up, to compel him to see the world in ways that would never have occurred to him.
After leading Job’s vision to the sky in the next few lines, the Voice from the Whirlwind moves on at the end of the chapter to the animal kingdom, with particular attention to beasts of prey — the lion and the raven. (One should remember that chapter divisions in the Bible were a medieval editorial intervention, and the lines to which I am referring were meant to initiate the tour of zoology that will continue to the end of the poem.) This zoological section, running to the end of chapter 39, then picking up after a few lines of address by God to Job with the climactic Behemoth and Leviathan in chapters 40 and 41, is too long for a reading here, but we can look at two passages. The first is in 39:1–12:
Do you know the mountain goats’ birth time,
do you mark the calving of the gazelles?
Do you number the months till they come to term
and know their birthing time?
They crouch, burst forth with their babes,
their young they push out to the world.
Their offspring batten, grow big in the wild,
they go out and do not return.
Who set the wild ass free,
and the onager’s reins who loosed,
whose home I made in the steppes,
his dwelling-place flats of salt?
He scoffs at the bustling city,
the driver’s shouts he does not hear.
He roams mountains for his forage,
and every green thing he seeks.
Will the wild ox want to serve you,
pass the night at your feeding trough?
Bind the wild ox with cord for the furrow,
will he harrow the valleys behind you?
Can you rely on him with his great power
and leave your labor to him?
Can you trust him to bring back seed,
gather grain on your threshing floor?
We are now returned to the theme of birth announced in the figurative language at the beginning of the poem. Birth is universal among animate creatures, and it goes on, far from human observation or human ken, in the mountains and the forests, beyond the grasp of the man who wished for his own birth never to have occurred. The animals of the wild “burst forth” with their little ones. Birth, too, is imagined as a violent process. This is a unique application of this verb to birthing — the general meaning of the verbal stem is “to split apart” — an indication that the poet is imagining procreation in a different way. The lines that follow take up a theme that will become more salient in the representation of Behemoth and Leviathan. The wild ass and the onager, out on the salt-flats and the steppes, live remote from any human control, scoffing at the crowded habitations of men and women, free from the whips and the commands of the driver.
As one sees elsewhere in biblical poetry, intensification within the single line is projected forward through a sequence of lines. In the four lines devoted to the wild ox, the poem’s audience is challenged with the question of whether they can ever domesticate the wild ass and subject him to servitude, hitch him to the plow, train him (fantastically) to bring back seed or gather grain from the threshing floor. This theme of the resistance of the beast to human mastery will be elevated to a new level of intensity in Behemoth and Leviathan. All this is a strong expression of the rejection of anthropocentrism: contrary to the assurances of Genesis 1, humankind will never be able to rule over the animal kingdom; there are forms of life simply too powerful for man.
A few lines down, the poem goes on:
Do you give might to the horse,
do you clothe his neck with a mane?
Do you make him roar like locusts —
his splendid snort is terror.
He churns up the valley exulting,
In power goes out to the clash of arms.
He scoffs at fear and is undaunted,
turns not back before the sword.
Over him rattles the quiver,
the blade, the javelin, and the spear.
With clamor and clatter he swallows the ground,
and ignores the trumpet’s sound.
At the trumpet he says, “Aha,”
and from afar he scents the fray,
the thunder of captains, the shouts.
Did the hawk soar by your wisdom,
spread his wings to fly away south?
By your word does the eagle mount,
and set his nest on high?
On the crag he dwells and beds down,
on the crest of the crag his stronghold.
From there he seeks out food,
from afar his eyes look down.
His chicks lap up blood,
where the slain are, there he is.
At this moment in the poem, before the eagle and before Behemoth and Leviathan, the poet introduces his famous description of the war horse (39:19–25). Here are some vivid lines from the beginning of this section:
Do you give might to the horse,
do you clothe his neck with a mane?
Do you make his roar like locusts —
his splendid snort is terror.
He churns up the valley exulting,
in power goes out to the clash of arms.
He scoffs at fear and is undaunted,
turns not back before the sword.
Some readers may wonder what it is doing here. There is one plausible explanation that does not immediately justify its inclusion in the Voice from the Whirlwind. It is that the poet put it here as a demonstration of literary skill: he was drawn to do it and knew that he could evoke this bellicose equine presence with remarkable vividness. He gets the sound of weaponry around the horse just right, enriching the depiction with an expressive alliteration — “clamor and clatter” in my version emulates the Hebrew ra‘ash werogez, with the accent on the first syllable of each alliterated noun. Sound plays an energizing role in the effect of the passage — the rattle of the quiver and the weapons, the clamor of the pounding hoofbeats, the blast of the martial trumpet. With all this, the fierce battle charger prepares the way for the two daunting beasts yet to come, Behemoth and Leviathan. Like them, he is at once glorious and frightening: “his splendid snort is terror.” Also like them, he embodies power and fearsome beauty that are beyond humanity, that do not relate to humankind: “Do you give might to the horse, / do you clothe his neck with a mane?” The war horse, in contrast to the wild ass and the onager, is surely saddled with a rider holding reins, at the command of the mounted warrior. The main point is that this fearless creature galloping into the midst of battle is imagined — in this one respect, unrealistically — as though he were virtually autonomous, charging into the fray out of the sheer love of armed combat.
The poet needs this divergence from verisimilitude in order to set the stage for those two creatures, Behemoth and Leviathan, who are impermeable to any human action and resistance. They will make their climactic appearance, beginning in verse 15 of the next chapter, after an intervention addressed by God to Job (40:1–14). In brief words God challenges Job to answer all that He has said, to which Job responds with a profession of his own worthlessness. God then resumes His speech, beginning as before with “Gird up your loins as a man.” But before that, in the last six verses of chapter 39, we move from the battlefield to the sky in the depiction of the hawk and the eagle. It is an appropriate place for the naturalistic phase of the zoological parade to end because it is a realm no human being can ever reach. Even the nests of these creatures of the sky are unreachable, placed in the crags of high mountains.
But what is it that the poet focuses on in the life-cycle of the eagle? That the eagle nurtures his young, an instinct that impels all creatures. The nurturing of the fledglings, however, necessitates killing: “His chicks lap up blood, / where the slain are, there he is.” I have been contending that this writer, virtually unique in biblical poetry, is a poet keenly interested in nature, but that interest is resolutely unsentimental. There is no anthropomorphizing in his vision of the natural world, no pathetic fallacy, no gentle rhapsodizing over the beauties of creation. He understands that nature is red of tooth and claw — the eagle’s chicks “lap up blood.” That is the harsh order of things. He lucidly sees that violence, even lethal violence, is an intrinsic element of the life-cycle in the animal kingdom. This does not really answer Job’s complaint about unjust suffering, but it does suggest that the world around us does not conform to our comforting assumptions about good and evil and that we have to live with a reality that resists our conventional moral calculus.
I will not consider Behemoth and Leviathan directly, because our scrutiny of the fierce creatures from the lion to the war horse to the eagle has anticipated much of what needs to be said about them. The difference between these two and the preceding creatures in the catalog of animals is that they straddle the border between zoology and mythology, thus culminating the poetic process of intensification. Presumably, they are based, respectively, on the hippopotamus and the crocodile, creatures of the Nile conveniently removed from the direct observation of the poet and his audience, mainly reported to them through travelers’ yarns. There are realistic touches in the depiction of both: Behemoth in the shallows of the river shaded by lotus, and willow, “hedged” — again that strategic verb — by the lotus, and Leviathan with his crocodile’s plate of armor, “His back is rows of shields, / locked close with the tightest shield,” and his fearsome teeth, “All around his teeth is terror.” But such naturalistic depiction seamlessly slips into the supernatural. “Could one take him with one’s eyes,” it is said of Behemoth, “with barbs pierce his nose?” (In fact the Egyptians did hunt hippopotami.) And before long, the naturalistic crocodile morphs into a dragon, his mouth shooting firebrands, his nostrils emitting smoke. He is impregnable to all man’s weapons (a note Melville would pick up in associating Leviathan with the Great White Whale): “When he rears up, the gods are frightened, / when he crashes down they cringe.” At this point, Leviathan has merged with the ferocious Canaanite sea-god from whom he takes his name.
In the logic of the poem, the poet needs these mythologized beasts for his conclusion because they crown his argument that there are things in nature beyond human ken and absolutely beyond any hope of human domination. The Psalmist, in a splendid celebration of man’s supreme place in a cosmic hierarchy, wrote: “You make him rule over the work of Your hands. / All things You set under his feet.” (Psalm 8:7) Tellingly, Job the sufferer quotes another line from this same psalm — “What is man that You should note him?” — but bitterly reverses its meaning to say, what is miserable man that You constantly scrutinize him to persecute him? Here, in the climax of God’s speech to Job, the idea that man exerts dominion over all things is powerfully opposed.
The writer responsible for this extraordinary book was not only a very bold poet, among other things coining imagery, as we have seen, that would not have occurred to any other poet in ancient Israel, but also a very bold thinker, not hesitating to challenge some of the essential ideas long cherished in the Hebrew tradition. The boldness of the poetry is a necessary vehicle for the boldness of the thought. Poetry of the first order of originality is a way of enabling us to see the world with fresh eyes. It is worth going back to a notion promulgated by the Russian Formalists a century ago, that what literature in general does is to shake us out of what had become complacent, unseeing perception through what they called “defamiliarization,” thereby bringing us back to the realities we had ceased to experience, making us feel anew the stoniness of the stone.
The poetry of the Voice from the Whirlwind does this on a philosophical level, serving, I would say, as the Bible’s ultimate defamiliarizer. As countless readers have complained, it does not really provide an answer for the dilemma of unwarranted suffering under a supposedly just God. But that dilemma has no real answer. There is no way of explaining why an innocent child should die of cancer or a benevolent woman perish in a fire with all her family. What the poetry does manage to do is carry us away in its sweep, in the brilliance of its riveting and sometimes startling imagery, occasion us to see the world freshly, prod us to let go of our habitual notions of man as the master of nature and the measure of all things, and realize that contradiction and anomaly and even violence are at the heart of reality — in sum, to accept the limitations of human imagination. We need to take in the power of the poetry in order to have a full sense of the originality of the thought.
