Let there be Darkness: Continuity and Discontinuity in the ‘Curse’ of Job 3

Abstract

This rhetorical and intertextual study of Job 3.1-31 finds in Job’s ‘curse’ a response to catastrophic suffering that is paradigmatic for both the linguistic construction of meaning and the reading of biblical texts. Job’s crisis exposes a fissure between human experience that does not conform to traditional understandings of a divinely ordered world and language constitutive of tradition. The resulting loss of coherence calls for a radical reordering of reality. Job recasts the schema of the Priestly creation account and convokes 16 jussives against the agencies of his birth—a pattern repeated in his Oath of Innocence—to conjure a world of reversals. Creation is dismantled even as its rhetoric provides the context for new meaning. A return to [UNKNOWN][UNKNOWN][UNKNOWN] (40.4) signals that the rift between experience and language may have begun to heal.