Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was.
\parencite{intro-to-job}
I’ve heard it said that “forgiveness is releasing the hope for a better past,” \parencite{wakefield} but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? That quote itself is more complicated than that:
There are ways around being the go-to person
even for ourselves
even when the answer is clear
clear like the holy water Gentiles would drink
before they realized
forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past
Primed as we are to take text out of context, wrap our own needs around it, and pretend that it is in all ways applicable to all situations (for did I not already ramble about mistaking accidental, individual symbols for universal ones?), it’s so easy to misremember that the better past we hope for is just some dream, some thing we cling to long after the us that lived that past has died.
Who knows if I was the go-to person, the punching bag for my Elihu, the object of her simple angers? Who knows if she remembers me? She cut contact, without telling me, without telling me why, and who knows if she even knows the reason?
Who cares, other than me?
All stories are perforce interpolations within real events.
The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of academic language will change that, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else.
“If Matthew died on September 6th, 2012,” I asked myself some years ago, “Was Madison born then?”
That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary years later. Matthew’s death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.
Matthew died and then I don’t remember what happened. I suppose there was a few years of fumbling around, poking and prodding at various parts of his body in the hopes that something could be salvaged. The hair, maybe? Or the softness of skin? Perhaps he could simply be recycled into something new, the same lump of clay molded and remolded into something new until some fresher breath of life was breathed into it.
If Matthew died in 2012 and Madison wasn’t born until a few years later, if I don’t remember those in-between years, then I keep questioning whether or not I actually existed then. I suppose 2013 involved dealing with the tic, and I guess we moved in 2014, but both of those stand-out events feel as though they happened to someone else, someone not Madison.
If Matthew died in 2012, why was I not born then?
The Book of Job, out of all of the books in the Hebrew bible, is buried deepest under layers of guesses. Even in the Christian bible, the only book that comes close is Revelation. Perhaps it is the dire nature by which both approach the world. Job takes a look at the world, heaves a weary sigh, and says, “I suppose this is it. This is the lot we have been given in life.” While Revelation looks at the world and growls deep in its throat, a sound coming from the belly, and says, “This must not be it. This cannot be the way in which the world works.”
Or perhaps it is the way in which they view death. While Job looks on death almost fondly, Revelation reiterates the Christian sentiment that death has been defeated using the genre of apocalypse (that is, a revealing, a pulling back of the curtain). The world that was is no more, and as there is everlasting life beyond it, it is worth considering only in that context and otherwise only worth discarding.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, in his investigation into the Book of Job On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, posits that Job exemplifies disinterested religion — that is, a non-transactional faith that holds even when there is not a direct benefit or punishment. “[The author of the Book of Job] believes it to be possible, although he undoubtedly knew the difficulty that human suffering, one’s own and that of others, raises against authentic faith in God. Job, whom he makes the vehicle of his own experience, will be his spokesman.” \parencite[1]{onjob} I find this argument extremely compelling as a way to describe the entirety of Job and its role in both Judaism and Christianity, my own thesis does not necessarily have anything to do with theodicy.
Rather, I’d like to posit that there are at least two possible outcomes for Job after the events of the book. On the one hand, Job might follow the path of Qohelet in the eponymous book (called Ecclesiastes in Christian bibles), or he can follow the path of Jonah. That is, he can maintain his disinterested faith, or doubt can overtake him. He can become the wise, if perhaps jaded, author of a text that argues “there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 8:15, NRSV) Or he can become the reluctant prophet who says to God that he is “angry enough to die.” (Jonah 4:9, NRSV)
The framing for The Book of Job takes the form of a fable, a set of universal symbols designed to instruct as well as entertain. The structure is as follows:
Job is a prosperous and pious man living in the merry old land of Uz. He is wealthy in livestock and in family, with his 7,000 sheep, his 3,000 camels, his cattle and she-asses, his slaves and his ten children. His seven sons love and respect each other, and he loves them all in turn (though he does seem a tad suspicious of their piety, making sacrifices in their names on their appointed days).
God, holding court with the sons of God, greets the Adversary and asks where they have been. They respond that they have been roaming the Earth, to which God replies, “Have you paid heed to My servant Job, for there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and shuns evil?” (Job 1:8, Alter)
And here is where we first run into trouble, for now is when the Adversary, the Accuser, shoots back, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not hedged him about and his household and all that he has all around? The work of his hands You have blessed, and his flocks have spread over the land. And yet, reach out Your hand, pray, and strike all he has. Will he not curse You to Your face?”
And God does it. He does it! He gives Job up to the Adversary, and of course, all that Job has, all that he’s gained and all of his offspring, are destroyed. Cattle and she-asses? Felled by the Sabeans. Camels? Stolen by the Chaldaeans. Sheep? Burnt up by none other than the fire of God Himself. His men are dead. His sons and daughters are dead, crushed beneath the walls of a house torn by a sudden wind.
Job, pious as he is, does not curse God. He tears his clothes, bows down, and blesses Him.
Even Job’s wife seems to sigh: “Do you still cling to your innocence? Curse God and die.” (Job 2:9, Alter)
There is a difference in interpretation, here. On the one hand, Alter suggests that Job’s wife is being sardonic here, saying, “Job’s wife assumes either that cursing God will immediately lead to Job’s death, which might be just as well, or that, given his ghastly state, he will soon die anyway” \parencite[469]{alter}. Might as well curse anyway, eh?
The editors of the NOAB take a more sympathetic view of the exchange. Job’s wife is seen as far more sympathetic: “The outcome of all Job’s piety has been to rob his wife of her ten children, her social standing, and her livelihood.” \parencite[737]{noab} Curse God, then. Who else could be responsible? How can you continue to praise after our ten (admittedly unnamed) children have died?
Once more, God says to the Adversary that there is none more pious than Job, and once more the Adversary jeers, “Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. Yet, reach out, pray, Your hand and strike his bone and his flesh. Will he not curse You to Your face?” (Job 2:5, Alter)
Yet again, God gives Job up to the Adversary — “Only preserve his life” — who strikes Job with a rash from head to toe, leaving him to sit among the ashes and scrape at his flesh.
When I wrote ally, in reply to asking myself that, I say, “If Matthew died in September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle.”
He’d been sick for months. He’d contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year. Words had been whispered, implications, innuendo, little hints in growing silence and distance. These drilled their way into him, teased out an immune response in the form of defensiveness, then left a husk behind.
Some long winter followed. He had died and crumpled to the ground. He mouldered a while before decomposing into the soil. He lay dormant beneath the earth, waiting for a thaw. Madison began to grow during that false spring that hits at the beginning of March, those two weeks of warm weather that convince you that winter must be over, it must have passed and it was time to air out the house, to wash your jackets and hang them up for the year. We always forget about the second winter, but false spring is enough for the buds to peek out.
Stories are as bound to time as we are, and all we can do is steal back a bit of that memory through however many words. All we can do with these memories pinned in place is regard them from a second level of distance and make guesses. All I can do now is make guesses as to the meaning of however many conversations — those very real words lost to the whims of technology — that lead to the slow and not always but often painful death of who I was.
Between the two halves of the fable — Job’s fall and God’s reinstatement of him — lies an intercalary period of at least a week wherein his friends — Though perhaps this ought to be put in qualifying quotes: “friends” — Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar (there is also Elihu; more on him later) commiserate with him, sitting silent for seven days and nights, before the last chapter of the book with the conclusion of the framing device. God commands that Job’s friends offer up sacrifices on his behalf, and when they do, all of Job’s wealth is restored twice over. 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels and so on, down to seven more sons and three more daughters (which he gives the delightful names Dove, Cinnamon, and Horn of Eyeshade). Job lives another hundred and forty years, long enough to see four generations of offspring, until he dies “aged and sated in years.” (Job 42:17, Alter)
Job’s life being torn to shreds means that his brief time here on Earth, the only time he has with nothing after it, is one that divides one’s life into finite fractions, into a before, a during, and an after. Job is struck for, what, two weeks? We may only guess, as the Adversary’s second visit to the sons of God and the Lord. And yet those are two weeks out of a finite number of years.
This centers God’s response as the sticking point. He spends four chapters responding to Job the conversations that have taken place between him and his friends. While these conversations make up the majority of the book, His response solely in the context of this framing device (which, we must remember, is an older folktale which has been re-cast as a framing device for the rest of the book) gives us a particular flavor of ‘God works in mysterious ways’ with more nuance than one commonly finds when that phrase is employed.
God appears to Job and his friends and expounds on the fact that none of them do — nor indeed can — possibly understand the ways in which he works. They’re not just mysterious, they’re vast and incomprehensible. This makes the most sense in a panentheistic view. If He is outside time, then, from our point of view, those ways stretch both forwards and back. If they envelop and pervade all things tangible and intangible, then they are beyond even our causal domain.
Even in a grounded, Jahwist, immediate and physical view of God (He is, after all, there in the form of a whirlwind), his entrance comes off as bizarre and unnerving. He passes through the physical plane as the Sphere does through the Square’s planar existence. Even in so physical a form, He proves His very incomprehensibility.
These interpretations are doing a lot of heavy lifting, however. They accept at face value Job’s capitulation in chapter 40, where, after being thoroughly excoriated by no less than God Himself, he says, “Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to You?” (Job 40:4, Alter) and “I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further.” (Job 40:5, NRSV)
And if He does not exist? The folktale and the book as a whole do not depend on the existence of God in their interpretation. They still work to repudiate the idea that, if bad things happen to you, it is because you’re a bad person.
Our Job, though, our poor, ruined man, has he changed? Has he grown into something new? Has he integrated who he was during those weeks or months of grief with who he was before that? Has he built for himself a new identity? Has he become braver? More fearful?
There is a saying that, with near-death experiences, there are two likely outcomes. One is that you become a braver, more vivacious person. You live your life all the fuller because you got so close to not living at all. After all, if you have been given a second chance, why not?
But still, there’s that second option: you become consumed by fear. You freeze up and do not leave the house. Any potential source of death is a thing to be avoided.
This is no value judgement. To be consumed by fear after having your own mortality stand up before you, sneer down its nose, and give you a playful shove bears no shame. It is an honest acceptance of who you are in the face of the enormity of the universe.
And sure, it might be a spectrum, and there’s probably that absolute midpoint where there is no change. You make it through that brush with death and come out the other side precisely the same as you were before. There is terror in this prospect, that death might be so overwhelming that there is nothing you can do but wrap that experience up in butcher paper, tie it with twine, and set it up in the attic.
Alter argues that the names that Job gives his new daughters points to a change. “The writer may have wanted to intimate that after all Job’s suffering, which included hideous disfigurement and violent loss, a principle of grace and beauty enters his life in the restoration of his fortunes.” \parencite[579]{alter} This is indeed a beautiful take on it, too. Job comes out the other side and names his daughters after growing things, beautiful things. Dove and Cinnamon and Horn of Eyeshade, the most beautiful in the land and a sign of Job’s joy in living.