The Book of Job and the Origins of Judaism

Abstract

Recently developed tools of intertextual analysis show that the dialogues in the Book of Job were in effect echoes of major debates in the early to middle Persian Period about the worth and responsibility of the individual in the new Judaism scattering throughout the empire. They expose the fallacy of the “conservative” tendency to apply past truth literally or statically to new realities without first making the necessary adjustments needed to address new problems. The earlier prophetic and deuteronomic arguments why Israel and Judah had been destroyed still served well to explain the national disaster, but the truth of them had to be refocused to apply to the new situation of individual experiences in widely dispersed Judaism. The Joban dialogues may thus have served as guide for Early Jewish debates about the role of the past when contemporized to the present, the critical function of canon.