Book of Job's Past, Present, and Future

An irony pervades the practice of writing the critical biblical commentary: quite often, the biblical scholar offers an analysis of an ancient literary artifact that seems antagonistic to its living legacy. Since biblical scholars often write critical commentaries for other specialists, they tend to focus their efforts on reconstructing the original context, discerning the shape of the original text, and uncovering the original meaning of the text. They ask very precise questions and linger over minute philological details in their answers. At their best, critical commentaries involve awe-inspiring levels of learning and research. At their worst, they avoid provocative questions and seem oblivious to the consequences of these literary artifacts for later readers. They are often indifferent if not hostile to creative adaptations of biblical texts, perhaps because those very adaptations comprise the things of which scholars feel they must disabuse people when teaching them about the Bible.

C.L. Seow’s recent tome on the first half of the book of Job stands uneasily — to say the least — within the tradition of the critical biblical commentary. On the one hand, Seow attends to all the text-critical, philological, and historical concerns of traditional critical commentaries. There are ample discussions of the relationships between and among alternate texts and versions, date, provenance, composition history, genre, structure, literary devices, and content. On the other, after introductory critical essays but before the conventional line-by-line commentary on Job 1-21, a monograph-length section (titled “history of consequences”) explores the interpretation of the book of Job in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities from antiquity to the present. In the field of biblical studies, this sort of research usually goes by the name “reception history,” but Seow’s choice to call it “history of consequences” underscores a dual agency. The text is not simply received; it has consequences for those who use it.