Job's Oath

Abstract

Job's bitterness arises as raw grief and bewilderment over the calamity that has befallen him. But under the press of the argument with his friends, which increasingly frames itself within the logic of reward and punishment and employs the imagery of a trial with its accusations and protestations of innocence, he falls into moral bitterness, a sense of outrage over the injustice done to him. When he finally swears an oath of innocence, this act, as often observed, unmasks the inadequacy of the courtroom imagery; for the God before whom he swears his innocence is at the same time the God whom he takes to be his accuser. I argue that this act shows Job reaching down to a sense of God experientially prior to and deeper than his sense of God as law-giver and judge. For he swears in the name of Shadday, giver of conception, birth and nurture. In this sense he may be said to appeal, in an elemental trust deeper in him than his moral bitterness, from God as judge to God as divine parent. The divine speeches come as a vindication of his trust, renewing his appetite for life in a world presented to him as a theater of manifold generative liveliness, dangerous but utterly worthwhile. Thus his personal struggle for the last truth about God ends with his discovery of the truth he had already encountered at the very beginning of his life. Reaching that last truth—or, rather, being reached by it—he resembles a tree which, though cut down, buds and puts forth branches like a young plant at the scent of water (14:7-9).