Violence in the Book of Job

Abstract

Violence is a significant dimension of the rhetoric of the book of Job. The opening chapters narrate events of extreme violence, and the poetic dialogues are full of language of hostility and cruelty, much of it attributed to God. In order to explore how violence, and particularly divine violence, is presented and employed in the book, I adapt a framework for discussing violence from the work of Slavoj Žižek, in which he distinguishes between three kinds of violence. Subjective violence refers to the acts of aggression and harm that are generally though of as “violence.” Systemic violence encompasses the devastating results of oppressive economic and political systems. Symbolic violence denotes the violence of language in the way it enforces specific constructions of reality, and the way in which such ideological constructions can have destructive consequences. The main body of the thesis begins with a comprehensive inventory of the imagery of subjective violence across the book as a whole. Much of the rhetoric of the book of Job presents Job as the ultimate victim of violence at the hands of God. However a fascinating shift happens when the book is viewed through the lens of systemic violence. In a detailed analysis of the way the text treats slaves, women, and the poor, I observe consistent patterns of oppression. Where Job is painted as the ultimate innocent victim of violence in much of the rhetoric of the text, he is the beneficiary, and even perpetrator, of systemic violence. The patterns of systemic violence are a product of a deeply unequal social and moral order which is barely questioned by Job and his friends. The speeches from the tempest, however, suggest a quite different approach to the ordering of the cosmos. The final part of the thesis explores symbolic violence in the text. Much of the book of Job operates with clearly defined assumptions – Job and his friends do not question the notion that there is a moral order, but rather argue about whether or not God has failed to apply it. However the shape of Job as a whole destabilises the monologic patterns of thought which tend to organise the world into hierarchical binary categories. Job uses the imagery of the Chaoskampf and the language of law and violence to protest his treatment at the hands of God, and to demand that YHWH serve as the guarantor of the socio-symbolic order. By contrast, YHWH delights in the monstrous and chaotic, and offers Job a vision of a wild and fecund creation in which human ideological interests are peripheral and monsters are not YHWH’s enemies. If the imposition of meaning against chaos is understood as symbolic violence, then this re-imagination of chaos against meaning is a potent critique. The dismantling of the socio-symbolic order generates considerable unease at the conclusion of the book. I conclude the thesis with a reflection on two modern creative works that respond to Joban themes in ways which engage with this openness and restlessness.