Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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