"Resistance and Surrender: The Self in Job 19."

Resistance and Surrender:The Self in Job 19

Amy Erickson

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With regard to Job 19, most scholars have been interested in the question of the identity

of Job’s redeemer in v 25. While this question is far from resolved, my interest is in a different

kind of identity question: How does the Joban poet’s rhetoric construct a “self” for the character

Job? How does that self compare with other selves constructed and presented in the Hebrew

Bible? How can we speak responsibly of transformation in Job without resorting to platitudes

that reduce the complexity of Job’s stance toward God?

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Posing questions of identity requires some engagement with theories of identity and the

self produced in and by a range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, sociology,

and psychology.1 Identity is constructed in a variety of ways and by a whole host of influences

(economic, educational, sociopolitical, etc.), and theories of identity emphasize that the self is

not a stable entity.2 Constructing a working identity for one’s self involves negotiating various,

conflicting offers of selfhood, and acquiring agency involves combining, and often rejecting, a

variety of self-making strategies.3 One way an identity or a self is constructed – indeed

negotiated – is through discourse. In her book, The Self as Symbolic Space, Carol Newsom points

out that different types of discourses offer different subject positions, thus a plurality of models

of what it means to be a person;4 therefore discourse itself is capable of creating – and offering

an invitation to adopt – a particular kind of selfhood.5

What I am interested in exploring is the way Job uses self-representational discourse to

construct his experience of suffering and to respond rhetorically to the powerlessness that results


1 For a cogent analysis of recent studies on identity as well as a critique of the use of the term “identity” itself, see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 28-63.

2 See Dorothy Holland, W. Lachicotte, D. Skinner, and C. Cain. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 28.

3 As Amy Cottrill notes “the individual’s agency lies in the way he or she combines various positions of subjectivity.” Language, Power, and Identity in the Lament Psalms of the Individual (New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 3.

4 Carol A. Newsom, Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran (Atlanta: SBL, 2004), 10. Here Newsom is drawing on the work of Bruce Lincoln (Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comprehensive Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 18-19). In her study on Qumran, she explores the ways in which discourse shapes identity, indicating that “every culture has a complete repertoire of identifying signs that are located in various parts of its collective discourse… A text that invokes one or another of them will evoke communities of correspondingly different dimensions and orientations” (10).

5 Carol Newsom refers to an “alternative figured world and self-identity.” Self as Symbolic Space, 21.



from the abuse God heaps on him.6 And yet, while Job resists divine violence and negotiates

agency in a radical way, the poet depicts Job as one who accepts his human vulnerability before

God. Ultimately, the way Job constructs his self in chapter 19 functions for the reader as an

invitation to adopt a particular culturally embedded and culturally reactive perspective on

suffering.7

Identities are not constructed in a vacuum; they emerge out of and in dialogue with

particular cultural traditions of selfhood. Because Job 19 contains numerous allusions to

Lamentations, chapter 3 in particular, it is compelling to address the question of how Job

structures his experience of suffering in conversation with Lamentations 3, in which the speaker,

who identifies himself as “the man (geber) who has seen affliction” (3:1), complains that God

has punished him without mercy.

My thesis is that by way of allusion, Job’s discourse in 19:6-12 evokes the network of

images used to depict the geber’s experience of suffering in Lamentations 3 (vv 1-9, in

particular) only to renegotiate that identity and the means to agency offered therein. The


6In her work on identity and agency in the psalms of lament, Amy Cottrill speaks to the ways “the self-representative language of suffering … ‘tells’ one’s self and others who one is, one’s valued structures of meaning, what one expects and desires from others as well as one’s sense of possibilities for agency.” Cottrill goes on to say that the telling of the self “is structured by privileged modes of speech and embedded relational narratives, a discourse that makes ideological claims about the world and the individual’s place in it. These implicit and explicit stories create and sustain identity for individuals” (Language Power and Identity, 1). Similarly the powerful voice of Job tells a self that has the potential to create and sustain a particular kind of identity for its readers, especially those who would identify with his experience of suffering.

7 Judith Butler describes the social embeddedness of the self by emphasizing that subjectivity is always created, influenced, and limited by its sociality and yet it is never fully determined. “The norms by which I recognize another or, indeed, myself are not mine alone….Thus the “I” seems invariably used by the norm to the degree that the “I” tries to use the norm.” Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 24, 26. Thus, every account of the self one attempts to provide is culturally embedded. In the case of Job, in particular, I say “culturally reactive” because he manipulates and exploits traditional forms and tropes in order to question orthodox assumptions about God, suffering, justice, etc.



difference in the two discourses lies in the way the two speakers respond to the experience of

suffering understood as divine abuse. In Lam 3:46-66, the geber abandons his complaint about

God’s persecution in favor of a call for vengeance on the enemies. In this way, he seeks to

overcome his powerlessness and gain agency through language of aggression. In contrast, the

Joban self can be seen as rhetorically acquiring agency by asserting his innocence and by

protesting vigorously against divine abuse. Job seeks to escape the divine violence inflicted on

him in a way that ultimately resists perpetrating a rhetorical cycle of violence that transfers the

divine anger from the suffering subject (the speaker) onto the “enemies.” And yet, Job’s

“confession” in 19:25-27 indicates that while resistance is a crucial aspect of Job’s identity,

surrender and vulnerability also have a role to play in the construction and transformation of the

Joban self.

Job’s response to divine violence is framed by the book’s assertion that his suffering has

nothing to do with guilt. The voices of both God and the narrator in the prologue of Job make

clear that Job does not suffer because of any sin he has committed. In his speeches in the

dialogue, Job continues in this vein, refusing to integrate guilt into his rhetorically presented self.

However, there is more to Job’s self than innocence, more at stake than his own personal

vindication.

What Job offers, in part, is a subjectivity that is a form of resistance to a dominant

discourse, evident in Lamentations and the biblical laments as well as in the Deuteronomistic

History and much of the prophetic literature.8 The dominant discourse in those texts – that


8 By dominant discourse, I mean “precisely what goes without saying... what everybody knows.” Newsom, Self as Symbolic Space, 17.



human suffering is the result of divine violence justified by human guilt and sin – is questioned

by Lamentations, 9 but in Job the counter-discourse, articulated as a protest against God, takes on

clearer form.10 And yet, as I have indicated, the Joban stance of protest in chapter 19 is

complicated by a portrayal of a self that is radically de-centered and vulnerable to an other, in

this case, a violent God.

Because as Carol Newsom notes, “identities are largely established relationally and

oppositionally,”11 I will read these two texts, Job 19 and Lamentations 3, with attention to the

ways Job and the geber position themselves with regard to the other players in their textual

worlds: God, community, and the human enemies. After exploring the intertextual threads

between these texts, I will turn to a discussion of Job’s “confession” in 19:25-27, incorporating

the theoretical work of Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas. The portrait of the Joban self – or

identity – that emerges represents an artistic blend of a transformed self, forged out of the tension

between resistance and surrender.


9 I suspect that Job engages the identity and worldview offered by Lamentations because Lamentations has already begun to question and critique the construction of communal identity presented by the prophets.

10 Carol Newsom explains, “counter-discourse… secures a place for itself by rendering problematic something that the dominant discourse takes for granted. Although counter-discourse may be polemical, often its relationship is not directly oppositional. It disturbs the smooth flow of what everyone takes for granted and in doing so calls attention to itself and gains a measure of cultural power by doing so. Whatever its particular strategy, counter-discourse presupposes and depends upon the existence of the dominant discourse in order to articulate itself.” Self as Symbolic Space, 18.

11 Ibid., 145.



Job 19:6-12. Recalling Lamentations 3:1-11

The network of images used to describe God’s treatment of Job in 19:6-12 deploys the

image of a siege-wall or net12 and clusters around the destruction of a city: its containment,

humiliation, reversal, the demolition of its walls, and finally its besiegement. The imagery in Job

parallels God’s punishment of Jerusalem as it is presented in Lamentations, in which the geber

laments that God has walled him in (19:8a // Lam 3:7), and caused him to sit in darkness

(19:8b // Lam 3:2, 6). Personified Zion similarly complains that God has reversed her status as

God’s “royal” city (19:9 // Lam 2:1) and that he has destroyed her militarily (19:10, 12 // Lam

2:2-9; 3:5, 12).13 In Job 19:8-12, God’s persecution of Job builds to a devastating military

action, which reaches its pinnacle when God unleashes an army of troops upon Job as if he were

a sinful city due an overwhelming punishment. Both Job and Lamentations depict their suffering

in terms that portray them as consumed, overrun, and nearly abolished by God’s military attack.

In Job 19:8, the Joban poet deploys images that consistently appear in the context of God

destroying, or threatening to destroy, his own city. Job complains, “He has walled up (גדר) my


12 Although the meaning of the Hebrew term, מצוד is disputed, the dominant view is that the noun māṣôd is derived from the verb, צוד, “to hunt” and means “net” (so Pesh and Targ; see Ecc 7:26; 9:12). The image of the net appears in the semantic fields of both the hunt and war. Military might in the ancient Near East was often expressed in terms of the net; therefore in Akkadian literature, there are references to kings catching their military enemies in their nets. As Pope notes, in the “Net Cylinder” of Entemena, one of the sanctions threatened against the violator of the treaty is the threat that Ningirsu will cast his net over the offender. Job, 141. Further as C-L Seow argues, like the psalmists, Assyrian kings frequently mix metaphors of the hunt and the battle, in particular the siege, thus “the distinction between military and hunting imageries is overwrought.” Choon-Leong Seow, “Job’s gōʾēl, Again,” in Gott und Mensch im Dialog Volume II: Festschrift für Otto Kaiser zum 80. Geburtstag (BZAW 345; ed. M. Witte; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 689-709 (692).

13 Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, "Intertextuality: Allusion and Vertical Context Systems in Some Job Passages," in Heather A. McKay and David J. A. Clines, eds. Prophets' Visions and the Wisdom of Sages: Essays in Honour of R. Norman Whybray on his Seventieth Birthday (JSOTSup162; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 272-3.



way so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness on my paths.”14 The verb גדר also appears in

Lamentations 3, in which the man laments that God has walled him about so that he cannot

escape (3:7)15 and used hewn stones to build a blockade in his way (3:9).16 Further, as in Job

19:8, Lam 3:6 incorporates the language of darkness, in which the geber complains of sitting in

darkness “like those long dead.”17 In Lamentations, the walls that once protected the city become

ruins that enclose its inhabitants in a prison of darkness and death. Similarly, the “walling up” of

Job also recalls the hedge, which the adversary accused God of building around Job (1:10).18 In

this way, Job evokes the image of a structure that once protected him (as in the hedge described

in 1:10) and presents it here (in 19:8) as having been transformed into a prison. The walls built

around him for protection now cast a shadow of darkness and death. Job and the geber present

themselves as imprisoned, enclosed, and shrouded in darkness. This type of discourse presents

the suffering speakers as powerless and deserving of a sympathetic gaze.


14 God’s troops literally build a “way” or rampart (דרך) against him. As Clines indicates, “the rampart or mound (sllh is the usual term; here, “they cast up their way”) is a commonly attested feature of warfare” (2 Sam 20:15; 2 Kgs 19:32 [= Isa 37:33]; Jer 6:6; Ezek 4:2; 17:17; 21:27[22]; 26:8; Dan 11:15). Job is portrayed as “a city ringed by siege troops, who build a rampart up to his gate so as to wheel up their battering rams.” David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20 (Word Biblical Commentary 17; Dallas: Word Books, 1989), 445. See Y. Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).

15 In Hosea, on account of her idolatry and apostasy, God hedges up (ךוׂש) feminine Israel’s way with thorns and builds a wall (גדר) against her so that she cannot find her paths (Hos 2:8 [Eng. 6]) and thus cannot pursue her lovers.

16 Dobbs-Allsopp suggests that here building imagery is evoked ironically in light of previous imagery of foundation-razing (2:8). Typically, rebuilding follows razing but in Lamentations only more destruction follows. In this context then, it may be that in Lam 3:7 and 9, “he has walled me about” suggests “the image of the destroyed city and temple walls being rebuilt as a prison.” F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations (Interpretation; Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 2002), 112.

17 The simile seems to function figuratively with a comparison to those who have literally been long dead, imprisoned in Sheol.

18 Édouard Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job (trans. H. Knight; London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1967); trans. of Le livre de Job (Paris: Gabalda, 1926), 7, 273.



In 19:9, Job says, “He has stripped my glory from me, and taken away the crown of my

head.” To the fore here is the reversal of Job’s situation. The glory and the crown, which are

emblematic of Job’s former life, are taken away, resulting in a complete reversal of

circumstances.19 In Lamentations 3:18, the geber says, “Gone is my glory, and all I hoped for the

Lord.” Thus Job and the geber deploy similar complaints about the reversal of their royal status.

Personified Zion uses the motif of reversal as well; the princess becomes a vassal (1:1), her

majesty has departed (1:6), her splendor is cast down from heaven (2:1b), and her crown falls

from her head (5:16). Like the once glorious city that has been destroyed, Job compares his

present misery with his former glory.20 Both Job and the voices of Lamentations depict

themselves not as ones who have consistently experienced poverty or suffering, but as ones who

have been stripped of glory and status as well as agency. This rhetorical move situates the self’s

former position as the correct one; the speaker was rightly privileged in the first place, and his

current position suggests that the proper order of things has been disrupted.

In Lam 3:1-13, images of an enclosure and obstruction appear in regular rhythm. As the

poem moves, the reader keeps running into the wall (this happens four times; 3:5, 7, 9, 11). The


19 F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter Zion: A Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (BibOr 44; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1993), 38-42. Dobbs-Allsopp points to the contrast motif (Kontrastmotiv) as a feature of the city lament genre in which the poet compares the glorious past to the desolate present. Motifs of contrast and reversal are common in city and communal laments (Lam 1:1; 2:1, 6, 15; 4:1-10, 20; Isa 47:1-2, 5; 23:7, 8, 12; Zeph 2:15; Ezek 27:1-11, 26-36; Isa 1:21).

20 Samuel Terrien argues that images such as these indicate that Job was a royal personage. Job: Poet of Existence (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock: 2004),186-88; repr. of Job: Poet of Existence (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merril, 1957). However, the language of royalty and status is likely metaphorical and not literal. Clines argues that Job’s crown is his honor or reputation as a righteous man. Job 1-20, 443-44. Similarly, Crenshaw claims that the royal imagery employed by Job is important for revealing Job’s self-worth. James Crenshaw, Whirlpool of Torment: Israelite Traditions of God as an Oppressive Presence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 72. While this is true, the image of the crown and other so-called royal metaphors also suggest Job’s previous intimacy with God, his status as one chosen by God to uphold divine ideals of justice and righteousness.



prayer to God is similarly blocked (םתׂש) in Lam 3:8a. There is a feeling of no escape, of

wandering around in darkness, and bumping against the stone blocks of a prison. The images

communicate the speaker’s narrowing possibilities for agency.

Similarly, the poetic unit of Job 19:6-12 is structured by two images of containment. In v

6, God’s net or siege wall encloses Job, and in v 12, God’s troops surround Job in his isolated

and flimsy tent. In this way, images of surrounding and containing work to “hem in” the unit.

Within the unit, the poem describes Job as stripped, humiliated, broken, and in v 11, Job

imagines God as planning and reckoning Job as God’s “enemies.”21 The surrounding movement

isolates and confines Job, so that Job stands alone, targeted by God’s wrath. Indeed his self, as a

plurality of enemies before God, is defined by this violent and targeted abuse.22


21 MT has “his enemies” while the Vrss all have the singular (cf. Job 13:24). Based on the Vrss, the singular is upheld by many commentators who believe the singular form to be original. Clines, Job 1-20, 444; Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job, 274-5; Marvin Pope, Job (AB; Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1965; 3d ed., 1973), 141; H. H. Rowley, Job (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976), 134; A. de Wilde, Das Buch Hiob: Eingeleitet, übersetzt und erläutert. OTS 22. Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1981), 209-10. MT has “his enemies” (v 11b). However, it would be logical for the Versions to translate the singular in the second line to maintain the singular from the first line as well as the reference to Job as the object of the verb. MT’s kṣryw is the more difficult reading. Further, in the laments, ṣar only takes a pronominal suffix (1 ms, 1cs, 3ms, 3mp) when it is in the plural (my enemies, our enemies, etc.) (Pss 3:2 [Eng. 1]; 13:5 [Eng. 4]; 27:2, 12; 44:6 [Eng. 5], 8 [Eng. 7]; 60:14 [Eng. 12]; 78:66; 81:15 [Eng. 14]; 89:24 [Eng. 23], 43 [Eng. 42]; 97:3; 105:24; 106:11; 108:14 [Eng. 13]; 112:8; 119:139, 157; 136:24). Thus MT Job 19:11 may contain an allusion to the individual laments. In Job, not only does God treat Job as a plurality of enemies; in Job’s estimation, God treats Job as he should treat the enemies known from the individual laments, those who target the righteous and therefore God. Instead God reckons Job to be like the enemies, while the wicked reap the rewards of the righteous (cf. Job 24).

22 While the suffering subjects in these two books present themselves as helpless, their expressions of pain not only give voice to their suffering but also position them as ones with authority to demand that their pain be recognized. The imagery of a wounded, broken body-city is comparable to what we find in the communal laments, in which the psalmist uses images of a decimated city to organize the experience of suffering. Because the images are commonly deployed in these laments, they constitute culturally accepted idioms (Cottrill, Language, Power, and Identity, 29). Thus by describing their suffering through the idiom of the broken city, Job and the geber access a source of the lament’s potency and the way it functions as, what Cottrill calls, “a vehicle for social positioning that demands action by the powerful on behalf of the powerless” (29). Job and the geber both deploy imageries that are familiar from the communal laments; thus their laments are, to a degree, culturally sanctioned.



In sum, images in Job 19:6-12 are filled with allusions to Jerusalem’s experience of

destruction at the hand of God.23 The forcefulness of these allusions indicates that Job seeks to

identify himself in terms that echo Israel’s experience of suffering immediately in the wake of

Jerusalem’s destruction. By way of these allusions, the reader who identifies with Lamentations

also recognizes his self in the persecuted and punished self articulated by Job.

However while the two books offer almost mirror complaints about being the victim of a

divine siege, the images that surround their complaints about divine abuse and the discourse they

deploy are quite different. The two speakers, Job and the geber, reach contrasting conclusions

about God, the ground of hope, and the means to overcome their suffering. The result is two

radically different avenues to agency.

Resistance, (Non)Violence, Transformation

Expression of confidence and the role of the enemies in Lamentations 3

After its graphic and sustained depiction of divine abuse, in Lam 3:1-20, the geber moves

to declare his hope in YHWH’s ḥesed (vv 21-22), which does not cease (תמם) and which he will

wait or hope for, a response typical of the individual laments (i.e., Pss 33:18, 22; 42:6, 12; 43:5;

130:7; 147:11). In the next unit, which begins in v 25, the geber suggests that the affliction he

has experienced at the hand of God is deserved. He deems that it is good (3:26-30) to wait with

hope and emphasizes his patient stance by using terms for “to wait” four times.24 In this way, the


23 Images of containment, enclosing traps, and darkness blotting out paths appear in both Lam 3 and Job 19. Neither Lamentations nor Job imagine this walling up to be protective (cf. Hos 2:8).

24 Three times he uses the verb יחל (vv 21, 24, 26) and once, קוה (v 25).



geber recasts his experience of sitting alone in silence (v 28) as “good” (v 26, 27). Whereas Job

refers to God uprooting his hope like a tree (19:10), the geber says, “to set his mouth in the dust

– perhaps there is hope (תקוה)” (v 29). In these ways, the geber silences his own complaints (דמם)

(v 28). Further the geber’s expression of trust in God in 3:38 (“Is it not from the mouth of the

Most High that good and bad come?”) resonates with Job’s second response to devastation in

2:10 (“shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?”). The sufferer

emphasizes a stance of hope-filled waiting oriented toward God. The relationally formulated self

here positions the sufferer and the deity as reconciled in a sense, and the suffering is recast as

meaningful, even “character building.”

Later in chapter 3, the geber expresses his faith and trust in God’s justice (3:34ff) as well.

The God who sees injustice can be trusted to correct it. The geber’s expression here resonates

with expressions of hope found throughout the book of Lamentations, which are connected, in

part, to divine seeing. Both Daughter Zion and the geber imply that God will be moved to

compassion if he will only look upon Zion’s suffering. (i.e., Lam 1:11; “Look, O Lord and see

how worthless I have become”; 1:20). The geber’s conviction that if God will see his suffering

not only expresses his hope in God’s just nature, it also affords him a degree of moral authority.25


25 Drawing on the work of medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (Social Origins of Distress and Discourse: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986]), Amy Cottrill argues that one way the language of bodily distress can function as a means to empowerment is that it provides the one suffering a “culturally recognized discursive role” as well as a means for others in her/his world “culturally sanctioned ways of expressing support and caring for the suffering person” (53). Cottrill concludes, “the somatic language of suffering in the laments invites the hearer to become a certain kind of ideal witness, sympathetic, protective, and possibly active on behalf of the psalmist’s restoration.” Language, Power, and Identity, 54.



The geber’s voice subtly asserts pressure on the deity to act in accordance with a model of justice

and compassion.

Additionally, the expression of confidence in Lamentations 3 includes images of the

enemy. Like the individual laments, Lam 3:36-66 actualizes the articulation of trust through

images of God destroying the enemies. By the end of Lamentations 3, the images of God as

enemy found in vv 1-16 have been replaced, almost completely, by images of “the enemies”

comparable with those found in the individual laments. In this way Lamentations 3 reasserts the

enemy imagery as well as the form of the lament in a traditional way. By transferring the guilt,

blame, and sin to the enemies, the geber seeks also to transfer the deity’s anger away from

himself and onto an other.

Despite the fact that Lamentations 3 has indicted God as the primary enemy (3:1-20,

43-45) and the geber has accepted and internalized the guilt (vv 40-42, 43-45), his declarations

of confidence (21-24, 25-36) shift the focus to the behavior of the enemies and end with the call

for God to destroy them (them being the enemies, described in stereotypical terms): “Pay them

back for their deeds, YHWH, according to the work of their hands. Give them anguish of heart;

your curse be on them, Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under God’s

heaven” (3:64-66). For the geber, this is justice (58-59), and it entails God taking up his cause

and seeing the malice in the faceless enemies rather than in the lamenter or in God’s self. God

and the geber are rhetorically positioned standing together on the side of right, and opposite the

two of them stands the enemy, who can now serve as a container or a target for the divine anger.

Agency is acquired and suffering mastered with rhetoric of violence and domination of an other.




Identifying with the discourse and perspective of the geber, the reader moves from helplessness

and shame to a position of restored honor and potency.26

Expression of confidence in Job

The rhetoric in Job 19 negotiates agency in conversation with the lament form, manipulating and

countering the received traditions and discourses around agency in suffering. Job’s response to

the same kind of divine violence described in Lam 3, however, reveals a different strategy for

acquiring agency.

Like the geber, Job complains of social alienation (19:13-19),27 and he scolds his friends,

to whom he attributes enemy qualities, for the errant words they hurl at him (19:2-5). After

complaining about those who speak against him and who have turned against him in vv 13-19,

the form of the lament, as well as the parallel with Lamentations, sets an expectation that Job

will now turn to God to see his plight at the hands of these “enemies” and return the divine

vengeance on them. However, Job does not do this; instead in a parody of the lament form, he

asks for mercy from his friends qua enemies (“Pity me, pity me, O my friends!” 19:21a),28 and

once again, places responsibility for the violence on God’s shoulders (“for the hand of God has


26 This kind of language of revenge, which is also a language of justice and righteousness, “is part of a discourse that affords the psalmist a position of violently achieved dominance over the enemy. Ability to inflict revenge portends restored honor and an identity of social worth.” Cottrill, Language, Power, and Identity, 95.

27 Complaints about alienation and isolation are common in the laments (Pss 31:12-14; 38:12; 41:10; 55:13-15; 69:9, 19; 88:9, 19).

28 The imperative “pity me” (חננני) is always addressed to God in the Psalms (Pss 4:2; 6:3; 9:14; 25:16; 26:11; 27:7; 30:11; 31:10; 41:5, 11; 51:1; 56:2; 57:2; 86:3, 16; 119:29, 58, 132; see also Ps 123:3, “pity us”).



touched me,” v 21b).29 Job disrupts the expectation still further by presenting the enemies as

allies of God. This stands in stark contrast to what happens in the individual laments, in which

the psalmist, like the geber, depicts his enemies as God’s enemies in a rhetorical attempt to

motivate God to defend not only the lamenter’s righteousness and honor, but God’s as well. Job

insists, however, that the “enemies” are like God, who feasts insatiably on his flesh (v 22).

This image of the enemies consuming the flesh of the lamenter is reminiscent of the

animal imagery often applied to the enemies in the laments.30 However, Job’s claim that the

friends are not satisfied with his flesh also suggests that the friends/enemies do not accept Job’s

profession of innocence because his flesh (his appearance), which God has manipulated, testifies

to his guilt.31 Job makes a similar claim in 19:5, when he says to the friends “and you convict me

This is followed by Job’s claim that God ”.(חרפתי) on account of my state of shame (עלי ותוכיחו)

has made Job appear guilty by imposing suffering upon him unjustly, ravaging his body (v 6

“Know that God has made me crooked (עותני)”).32

Further in the section on his alienation (19:13-19), Job laments that his servants and

family do not recognize him. The language of “stranger” and “strangeness” permeates this unit:


29 Verse 21b also constitutes an allusion to the prologue (Job 1:11; 2:5) and reminds the reader that God has destroyed Job “for no reason.”

30 Images of the enemies as dangerous animals, including lions, dogs, wild oxen and bulls, appear in Pss 7:3; 10:9; 17:12; 22:13, 14, 17, 21, 22; 35:17; 57:5; 59:7, 15.

31 In Aramaic, the phrase “to bite the flesh” (ʾăkal qarṣā) is idiomatic for “to slander” (see Dan 3:8; 6:25). Similar idiomatic usage occurs in Akkadian and Syriac.

32 In Lam 3:36, the geber asks, “When a person perverts (עות) a lawsuit (ריב), YHWH does not see?” By contrast, Job asserts: “Know that Eloah has perverted (עבת) me and has closed (נקף) his net around me” (19:6)… “There is no justice” (19:7). The problem is not that God has not seen the injustice. The problem is that God has imposed the injustice (cf. Job 9:24, in which Job accuses God of blinding the judges).



Job’s friends are estranged (זרו) from him (v 13); Job’s breath, even his “spirit” (רוח), is strange

me a stranger (בׁשח) to his wife (v 17). And in v 15, he says, “the guests of my house reckon (זר)

is picked up from v 11, where Job בׁשח I am in their eyes.” The word ,(נכרי) as a stranger / (זר)

says “God has reckoned (בׁשח) me as his enemies.” Such wordplay suggests that God’s reckoning

of Job as “his enemies,” along with the physical appearance God has imposed on Job, which

emerges as a result of God’s (wrongful) persecution, results in the community’s misperception

(or mis-seeing) of Job.

The motif of the one so afflicted with pain that he cannot be recognized is not unique in

Job. Indeed in Lamentations, Jerusalem’s princes are not recognized on the street because their

visages are blacker than soot; their skin has been shriveled on their bones (Lam 4:8; see also

Lam 4:2, 7). But Job takes imagery of the broken body from Lamentations, as well as from the

individual laments, and extends and even exploits it in order to indicate the degree to which the

body can be mis-seen, and the self not recognized. In this way, Job uses the image of the

desiccated body not only as an indicator of suffering; he also draws on the ruined body as

unrecognizable to point to the way it functions, for him, as a false witness (cf. Job 9:20).

Perhaps because Job’s physical testimony is so compromised, he longs for an inscription

to present his words (vv 23-24).33 But he moves from the image of an inscription to his classic

“confession”: “But I know that my redeemer lives.” And strikingly, Job’s speech is filled with the


33 While MT has lāʿad (“forever”), Theod, followed by Jerome, has lĕʾēd (“as a witness”). Although MT is sensible as it stands, Theodotian’s translation helps identify the wordplay. Job wants a witness that is, unlike his flesh (which will never satisfy his accusers), enduring. He desires a physical stand-in for his flesh that will not decay as his flesh has. Job longs for a lasting inscription to function as a witness that will not be hampered by the guilt the desiccation of his body communicates.



language of seeing. “Without my flesh, I will see God, whom I, I will see for myself. My eyes

will see, and not another” (vv 26b-27).34

Again Job disrupts the expectation established by the laments. Compare Ps 59:9, in which

the psalmist presents himself as empowered and proven righteous. He imagines his restoration as

the day when he will “look triumphantly on [his] enemies.” The suffering self in the laments

imagines accessing power by looking at the enemies and seeing their shame (as in Lamentations

3 and in Ps 59). This seeing, which results from proper divine seeing, is part of what affords the

psalmist agency. When Job asserts that he will see God in v 26, he activates all the associations

connected with the images of the enemy, seeing and mis-seeing, that he has deployed and re-

deployed from the laments previously. Instead of affirming his trust in divine seeing, Job trusts

only in his own seeing.

As one who has been the object of God’s hostile, scrutinous and violent gaze (as is

evident in the image of God as the “watcher of humanity”; see, for e.g., Job 7:20), Job longs for

the tables to be turned when in 19:26 he imagines that he will do the seeing (after there is

nothing left to see of Job himself – after his skin has been flayed from his bones). Then Job will

have power and autonomy because his body will be released from the divine gaze and he will be


34 The phrase, ירׂשמב, appears twice in ch 19. The min could be privative, meaning “without my flesh” or “separated from my flesh.” Thus here in v 26, Job would indicate that he will see God without his flesh, meaning he will face God, perhaps in the courtroom, without his guilty-looking flesh, his guilty appearance. In light of Job’s complaints about his flesh and his body creating legal problems for him (problems of perception), we can interpret the problem as ongoing in ch 19. The problem in v 20 is not that he is disembodied as such but that he has not been thoroughly disembodied. The problem with his legal case has been the testimony of his body (Job 9:15, 18, 20, 30-31; 16:8, etc.). Thus he fantasizes that he could remove himself from his flesh, so that his corrupted flesh would not hamper his testimony. I am not implying here that Job longs for some sort of resurrection of the soul but that Job’s fantasy entails escaping the testimony he wears constantly – his flesh (as opposed to a robe of righteousness and a cloak of justice, as in Job 29:14).



the one to look starkly and unmercifully on God, revealing God’s farcical commitment to justice.

Thus, it is the hope of seeing God – the sole inflictor of the violence upon his body – that affords

Job’s self agency.35 In contrast to the petition for revenge on the enemies, which dominates the

final verses of Lam 3, is mostly absent in Job 19. Rather than articulating a desire to see his

enemies destroyed, Job expresses his desire to see God, his enemy par excellence, face-to-face.

What then, are we to make of Job’s concluding words in chapter 19? Vv 28-29 are

difficult to say the least. Do they call for vengeance upon the friends as some commentators have

suggested?36 Consistent with the parody of the lament form that runs throughout chapter 19, the

best interpretive option here is to see vv 28-29 as a continuation of the lament parody. Given his

sustained interest in the way his former household and community now view him (19:13-19), his

words here are likely addressed not only to the friends, but also to all of those who see him as

guilty or as an evil-doer who has been punished for some crime or offense to the deity. Although

the meaning of these lines is somewhat obscure,37 Job (in v 28) quotes his detractors, the content

of which mirrors the psalmists’ desire to turn about the violence and guilt onto the “enemies:”

“For you will say, ‘How we will persecute him’ as though the root of the thing is found in me.”

V 29 is even more difficult, but Job seems to warn that his persecutors will find that the sword

they have used against him will, by contrast, devour them in the end. Although his former friends


35 In the laments, there is confidence in God’s visual perception. The psalmist is convicted that if God sees, God’s compassion and desire for justice will be mobilized. However, in Job, human mis-seeing is the fault of God. God is duping everyone around him by manipulating his or her vision. When God destroys Job, financially, physically and psychologically, the result is the community’s perception of him as guilty.

36 Pope says, “Verse 29 appears to smack of the argument of the friends rather than Job.” Job, 147.

37 Of vv 28-29, Pope observes: “these lines are a jumble of verbiage and possibly the text is damaged or misplaced.” Job, 147.



and household persecute him in the hopes of diverting “the sword” away from themselves and

onto an other, their own violence will ultimately consume them.

In this way, Job’s speech ends in an attempt to expose the cycle of violence that the

dominant discourse engenders and perpetuates. Drawing on the work of Miroslav Volf, Carol

Newsom notes that “when identity is threatened, the necessary other may be redefined in ways

that reduce ambiguity.”38 Job’s words indict the people who have judged him and who have

identified him as guilty in order to stifle any anxiety they may harbor about their own identities.

For in order for Job’s judges or detractors to protect their own identities (as righteous or

blameless and physically whole and financially prosperous) and their own orthodoxies, they

must characterize him as morally repugnant. Volf argues that when one seeks to defend oneself

as purely good or righteous by casting onto the other all that is negative, violence against the

other is legitimated.39 Job seems to indicate here that those who cast him as “all bad” will only

reap the violence they sow; the sword they yield against him will only result in a cycle of

violence that will inevitably end with their own destruction.

Job’s Counter-Discourse: Radical Resistance

Read against Lamentations 3 and the individual laments, Job’s rhetorical moves here

enact resistance to a dominant discourse.40 As Newsom notes, “whatever its particular strategy,


38 Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 146.

39 Ibid., 146.

40 Newsom, Self as Symbolic Space, 14.



counter-discourse presupposes and depends upon the existence of the dominant discourse in

order to articulate itself.”41 Job depends on Lamentations, as well as the biblical laments, to

articulate his self as an empowered subject and his relationship with God and the others around

him in a way that is different from the one modeled in the dominant discourse.

In sum, instead of positioning himself as an object of horror so as to spurn divine

compassion, as Daughter Zion does, or seeking to transfer the divine violence to another object

(the enemy) as the geber does, following the lead of the laments, Job asserts his power as a

seeing subject, a subject who will see God.42 At the same time, Job presents himself as one who

will see God but whose vulnerable, unreliable flesh will not be seen by God. In this way, Job

asserts agency by resisting the divine gaze, with its attendant violence.

In Lamentations 3, divine violence leads to internalized guilt that ultimately is re-directed

outward, not towards God, but towards the “enemies.” Thus agency is claimed and gained by

rhetorically overpowering the enemies. The experienced violence and shame that is internalized

by the self is alleviated by transferring it to an other. But in this schema, the inflictor of the

violence is left largely untouched; his policies of punishment and torture are not only accepted

but also reinforced.43 Perhaps the reason Job does not resort to shifting the blame lies in his


41 Ibid., 18.

42 In Lamentations, like the psalms of lament, Daughter Zion highlights her desperation and heightens the rhetoric in order to attract the deity’s attention. In part, Job’s rhetoric, which emphasizes his vulnerability in the face of God’s power and scrutiny, functions as a cry to the reader to pay attention, to see and focus on God’s sin.

43 Similarly, with Mesopotamian images that represent such violence, Bahrani observes that “execution and torture belong to the rituals of war that affirm and restore power. The Mesopotamian images … do not simply record the violence of war. They also delineate the power to punish.” Zainab Bahrani, Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2008), 219.



refusal to internalize the divinely inflicted violence as guilt. Regardless, for Job agency lies in

radical resistance, not only of orthodoxy but also of the cycle of violence embedded in the

lament form.44 In this way, Job evokes the understanding of suffering offered by Lamentations 3

but ultimately transforms it with a sustained discourse of protest against divine violence. In

demanding a direct confrontation with God, Job’s discourse offers a different means to agency.

Further, Job shifts the focus from the question as to whether he is innocent or guilty to the

issue of God and whether or not God is just. In this way, Job constructs a self that seeks agency

in a way that subverts the dominant discourse. The agency offered is rooted not in transferring

the guilt and condoning divine violence but in performing resistance to divine violence.

Identity theories indicate that frequently, identity is formed at the site of contradiction.

The contradiction laid out in the book of Job is between Job’s conviction (and the reader’s

knowledge) of his innocence and God’s intentional, directed violence at the innocent Job. Carol

Newsom notes that the way a speaker “situates himself within a conflict is what confers

identity.”45 When there is a “crisis of contradiction” in a text, it need not be resolved by

dissolving that contradiction; instead identity may be constructed “by insisting on the

contradiction,” which is precisely what Job does throughout his speeches.46 The Joban poet


44 Critique of violence is not absent from the literature of the post-exilic period. The book of Esther can be interpreted as a parody of the cycle of violence perpetuated by those with power. Jonah is another example of a book that can be understood as a critique of violent patterns of thought, with its parody of judgment on the nations. Both books expose the problems with calling for (as in Jonah) or performing (as in Esther) vengeance on one’s enemies. Further there are texts from Assyria and Babylon that can be understood as critiques of violence. Zainab Bahrani categorizes the Erra epic, like the tradition of the city lament, as “an early philosophical contemplation of the nature of violence and the force of war.” The epic “explains war as a force more powerful than any other, a mechanism which is a brute compulsive drive that destroys everything in its wake.” Rituals of War, 208.

45 Newsom, Self as Symbolic Space, 232.

46 Ibid., 229.



demands that the reader recognize this contradiction, not only in Job’s situation, but also in his or

her own self and experience. For the book of Job addresses readers who have been shaped by the

dominant discourse’s view of suffering, a view that has shaped Lamentations 3, as well as the

Deuteronomistic Historian and the prophets.

Surrender and Transformation

As I have argued, Job’s speech in chapter 19 performs acts of deep resistance. And yet, while

Job’s discourse enacts resistance to dominant understandings of suffering, there is a way in

which Job’s language in chapter 19 simultaneously enacts a certain vulnerability of the self. Job’s

stance here before God resonates with what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as a radical and willful

passivity.

At this point, I want to circle back to Job’s “confession.”

But I know that my redeemer lives,And ‘the last’47 will arise on the dust. And after my skin has been stripped off, 48 without my flesh,49 I will see God, whom I, I will see for myself. My eyes will see – and not another (vv 25-26b).


47 MT’s ʾaḥărôn is typically translated “at the last” (so NRSV, NIV, NAB, NJPS), and yet in Hebrew, this form is never used adverbially; for “at the last” or “afterwards,” we would expect ʾaḥărônâ. ʾaḥărôn is a nominal form, most likely a substantive. Its parallel, my redeemer, is also suggestive of a divine epithet. Second Isaiah, a text to which the book of Job often alludes, refers to God as redeemer and “the first and the last” (rîʾšôn wĕʾaḥărôn): “This is what the LORD, Israel’s king, says, their redeemer, the LORD who commands armies: ‘I am the first and I am the last, there is no God but me’” (Isa 44:6). Pope, Job, 146; John Gray, The Book of Job (ed. D. J. A. Clines; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010), 274-5.

48 The meaning of wĕʾaḥar niqqĕpû is difficult. One expects the relative particle ʾăšer. There is likely wordplay withʾaḥărôn. I understand niqqĕpû (“they have stripped”) in the impersonal sense.

49 I read the min of ירׂשמב as privative, meaning “without my flesh” or “separated from my flesh.”



These words of Job’s are among the most quoted and celebrated in the book’s reception history.

That so many interpretations point to some transformation evident or at work through the speech

of Job demands that an analysis of the self and transformation engage in a deeper reading of this

particular pericope. While I do not maintain that Job proclaims his belief in the resurrection of

the body (an interpretation popular among pre-modern Christian interpreters, starting with

Clement of Rome) or that this text marks “the crescendo of faith to which Job attains,”50 I do see

Job’s statement in vv 25-27 as crucial for understanding the self that Job presents.

Although commentators have proposed a variety of answers to the question of the

redeemer’s identity,51 given the numerous times the Hebrew Bible refers to God as redeemer (Isa

41:14; 43:14; 44:6, 24; 47:4; 48:17; 49:7, 26; 54:5, 8; 59:20; 60:16; 63:16; Jer 50:34; Ps 78:35;

“my redeemer,” Ps 19:15), it follows, that at the least, the poet has God in mind. However, Job’s

words do not indicate that he is making a statement of faith; they function, instead, as a challenge

to God. The tone is tinged with irony.52 Job also claims to know that “the last,” a divine epithet,

will rise (קום) on the dust. This “knowledge” is also ironic and draws on the notion of the

sleeping deity who must be awakened in Psalms. The psalmists challenge God to “awake” or

“arise” and deliver (Pss 7:7; 35:23; 44:25; 74:22). Similarly, Job’s claim that God will rise

implies the current stupor of the deity. If God is truly “living” and capable of action, then God


50 Robert Gordis, The Book of Job (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1978), 204.

51 For survey of the various interpretations, see David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20 (WBC 17; Dallas: Word Books, 1989), 457-466.

52 Seow, “Job’s gōʾēl, Again,” 699-701.



should act accordingly.53 Job’s words to this point have not expressed any confidence in a

delivering or living God who will intercede to redeem him. Similarly, here Job’s words are shot

through with irony and skepticism. Job’s “confession” highlights the ways God has forsaken

God’s traditional roles. Further, when Job seems to speak favorably of God elsewhere, his words

are ironic and sarcastic (7:17-21; 9:4-10; 12:7-25; 13:14-16). 54

Commentators have made much out of Job’s language of knowing in v 25 (“I know that

my redeemer lives”), suggesting that such knowledge stems from a place of deep faith and

conviction.55 However, Job says, “I know,” elsewhere in the book (9:2, 28; 10:13; 13:18; 21:37;

30:23), and in each instance, Job’s knowledge does not appear to be rooted in blind faith or even

based on fact; rather, when Job asserts, “I know,” that knowledge is rooted in his interpretation of

his experience. He claims to know much about God’s designs and intentions (as in 9:28; 10:13;

30:23) as well as those of the friends (21:37). In chapter 9, Job also claims to know that God

would not find him innocent and yet, in chapter 13, he says he knows that he could be successful

in a lawsuit against God if he were given a fair chance (13:18). That Job knows that he could not

win a legal case against God (9:28) does not stop him from continuing to demand a legal hearing

before God. Thus when Job says, “I know,” this knowledge represents a blend of conviction,

speculation, and imagination, rooted not in factuality or faith but in interpretations of others’


53 The parallelism between ḥyh/ḥyy “lives” and qwm “awaken/arise” reflects a poetic pair in pslams challenging the sleeping God to awake and redeem or deliver (i.e., Ps 44:24-25). Seow, “Job’s gōʾēl, Again,” 702. On the trope of the sleeping deity called to rise and act, see M. L. Barré, “The Sleeping God: An Ancient Near Eastern Motif of Divine Sovereignty,” Bib 68 (1987): 153-77.

54 Seow, “Job’s gōʾēl, Again,” 697.

55 See, for example, John E. Hartley, The Book of Job (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans. 1988), 292.



thoughts and plans based on his experience. Further, when Job claims to know something about

God, it also functions as a kind of taunt – a dare to God to prove or disprove what Job

“knows” (that God is trying to kill him or that God would not give Job a fair trial). The “I know”

in v 25 appears to function in this way as well. Job claims to know that his redeemer lives. If God

can act in that capacity – as living redeemer – God ought to act to prove it. It is a challenge more

than a statement of faith.

And yet the notion of a living redeemer, however dripping with irony and challenge it

may be, combines with images of Job’s body and the language of seeing and results in a stunning

poetic unit, one in which Job’s self, imagined as a body stripped of its flesh before God, is

depicted as highly vulnerable and radically relational.

The image of Job’s disembodiment is parallel to the image Job uses in v 20: “by my skin

and by my flesh, my skeleton clings” (cf. also 16:8). Job’s broken and deteriorating body is a

metaphor for the destruction of self – physical, spiritual, emotional, existential – he has

experienced. And yet, in v 26, the image of the body as shattered and distorted is re-deployed.

Job declares that his fleshless, nearly body-less, self will see God.

There is a marked contrast between the former self Job remembers in chapter 29, in

which he is clothed in righteousness and justice (29:14), and the self he presents in 19:25-27. In

the Hebrew Bible, to be naked is to be vulnerable, physically and socioeconomically. Prisoners




and captives of war are often depicted stripped naked in Mesopotamian iconography.56 In v 25,

Job is not merely naked, without clothes, like a prisoner of war; indeed he is naked, without skin,

without flesh. And yet, it is here, from this de-fleshed self that he demands to see – indeed claims

that he will see – God face-to-face. After apparently lamenting his deteriorating physical

condition, Job seems to stand before God, fully embracing – or at least, proclaiming – that he is

utterly and entirely vulnerable.

Judith Butler’s theoretical work on the self and identity may help us better understand

both the Joban poet’s depiction of Job’s vulnerability before God as well as the contrast between

the self constructions and the discourse of violence in Lamentations 3 and Job 19. In Giving an

Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethical framework rooted in the human subject’s inherent

limits of self-knowledge and vulnerability to the other. 57 Although Butler’s theory designates the

other as a primarily human figure, as Carol Newsom notes, theories rooted in analysis of human


56 Helga Weippert argues that more extensive clothing indicates higher status. “Textilproduktion und Kleidung im vorhellenistischen Palästina,” in Gisela Völger et al., eds., Pracht und Geheimnis. Leidung und Schmuck aus Palästina und Jordanien (Köln: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum der Stadt Köln, 1987), 136-142 (140-41). This article contains illustrations of the scenes from both the “black obelisk” and the ivory plate from Megiddo. While men are rarely depicted naked in ancient Near Eastern iconography, captives of war appear naked with some regularity. In a monumental relief depicting Shalmaneser III’s campaigns against Phoenicia and on the ivory plate from Megiddo, we see a line of naked male captives, and on the “black obelisk” of Shalmaneser III, depicting the subjection of King Jehu, the conquered king appears without a garment on his upper body. See Pritchard, The Ancient Near East in Pictures, plate 358, lower register. On the ivory plate from Megiddo (Tel el-Mutesellim, 14th-13th C B.C.E.), the captives in chains are naked, two soldiers wear loincloths, the palace servants wear long robes, and the king and the two women next to his throne are most extensively clothed.

57 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).



interaction are appropriate to apply to Job because of the book’s “deeply anthropomorphic,

personal language for the God-human relation.”58

Undergirding Butler’s work on the self is the idea that one is always enacting the self,

thus the self is a fundamentally dynamic and perpetually changing concept. When the “I” or the

subject performs itself or gives a narrative account of itself, it is always partial. Such narrative

formation always comes at a cost to the subject. On the one hand, one must give an account of

one’s self, tell one’s story, in order to preserve one’s sanity. On the other hand, the self is opaque

even unto its self, for no subject can account for its origins, its relation of dependency, or its

social emergence and conditioning. While this inability to account for oneself may seem, on the

surface, problematic, for Butler, this opacity of the self – this lack of coherence in one’s own

narrative – is not a problem. Instead, within the ethical framework Butler develops, it is the

concept of responsibility that requires a full comprehension of the self that leads to violence.

When the self is preserved and acknowledged as incomplete, inherently relational, partially

recognized and recognizable, and narrated opaquely and incoherently, then a self can realize

transformation, or in Butler’s language, become more responsible and more fully human. The

self’s own opacity de-centers it, giving it the capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on

others.59

However, a more typical pattern of development is that the self refuses to “acknowledge

the limits of acknowledgement itself,” and when it experiences its self as impinged upon by an


58 Newsom, A Contest of Moral Imaginations, 148. Here, Newsom is referring specifically to the work of Emmanuel Levinas.

59 Butler, An Account, 41-2.



other, the subject responds by “resolving grief and staunching responsibility too quickly through

a turn to violence…”60 In the face of violence, the self typically returns that violence. “Many

atrocities are committed under the sign of a ‘self-defense’ that, precisely because it achieves a

permanent moral justification for retaliation, knows no end and can have no end.”61 Butler

speculates that it is the very experience of being imposed upon, against one’s will, that heightens

one’s sense of responsibility;62 therefore, if one instantly retreats from this sense of being

imposed on, of being utterly vulnerable before an other, one cannot become more human.

However, if the self encounters an other and allows that other to impinge on the self without

returning the violence or acting in “self defense,” this interaction leads to a transformation of the

self. “The way in which we respond to injury may offer a chance to elaborate an ethical

perspective and even become human.”63 If one responds to injury, not with retaliation, but with

openness, one can find the ground of responsibility. By responsibility, Butler means not “a

heightened moral sense that consists simply in an internalization of rage and shoring up of the

superego… [or] a sense of guilt that seeks to find a cause in oneself for what one has suffered,”

all of which she identifies as forms of narcissism, rooted in claims of self-sufficiency and having

the effect of the self recoiling from the other.64 Rather by responsibility, she means that we act


60 Ibid., 42, 100.

61 Ibid., 100-101.

62 Ibid., 99.

63 Ibid., 101.

64 Ibid., 99.



out of an acceptance of our vulnerability in the face of the other, the almost unbearable totality of

the self’s relationality.

As I have already argued, Job rejects violent “self defense” in that he does not pursue a

retaliatory strategy against an (or any) other. Job acknowledges the ways in which his self is

utterly besieged by God (19:6-12); in Butler’s terms, Job’s is a self dramatically and

traumatically impinged upon. And yet, in the face of the violence done to him, he does not seek

revenge or to deflect divine violence; rather, in vv 25-27, Job appears to accept – and even

heightens – this state of vulnerability before God.

Butler indicates that the path to responsibility and transformation demands that we

acknowledge “that we are impinged upon primarily and against our will,” which is a “sign of a

vulnerability and a beholdenness that we cannot will away.” Accepting this state of vulnerability

leads to a “sometimes unbearable relationality.”65 This might mean that “one does not foreclose

upon the primary exposure to the Other, that one does not try to transform the unwilled into the

willed, but, rather, to take the very unbearability of exposure of the sign, the reminder, of a

common vulnerability, a common physicality and risk…”66

Job’s challenge to God in 19:25-27 demands, in part, a mutual recognition of their

common vulnerability, for Job desires to meet God face-to-face. He insists that he will see God.

Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical work on ethics in the face of the other is helpful as well.


65 Ibid., 100.

66 Ibid.



Levinas writes, “the facing position, opposition par excellence, can be only a moral summons.”67

Job surrenders to God, in that he makes himself fully vulnerable before God, but he

simultaneously calls God to account with his own face! The face for Levinas is the ultimate site

of accountability, for it is the face that commands the other: “do not kill.” Job engages in an

attempt to reverse the process of dehumanization God has wrought by meeting God face-to-face,

by confronting God with his own face. As Levinas acknowledges, there is tremendous risk

inherent in this kind of confrontation because while he believes that even though the face of the

other pleads, “do not kill me,” the face can also conjure a murderous impulse.

The Joban self in chapter 19 expresses his utter vulnerability before God – this is what he

knows: that he is entirely at the mercy of a murderous God (in 9:28, Job claims to know that God

is trying to kill him). Job is impinged upon against his will to the point that his sense of self

appears at times to fray at the edges. Descriptions of his physicality highlight the incoherence of

his self (19:20). And yet, he demands to stand before God, embracing his deteriorating

subjectivity because he imagines that once he is fully vulnerable, without flesh and without skin

to hold him together as a physical self, then he will encounter God without distance. Job will see

God for himself (v 27). There will be no distance between the two of them, and such a face-to-

face encounter has the potential to be mutually transformative. Indeed, in chapter 19, the mere

idea of a face-to-face meeting with God evidences a transformation in Job.

However, to say that the Joban self experiences transformation does not mean that he is

now whole or strong or a self restored to coherence. As Butler maintains, there can be “no re-


67 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 196.



centering of the subject without unleashing unacceptable sadism and cruelty.”68 Job’s

transformation is partial, de-centered, and rooted in his surrender to utter vulnerability before the

other. Contrary to the dominant strands of reception of this passage, Job does not express the

hope that God will redeem him from his suffering. Rather in this pivotal chapter, Job imagines

redemption as tied somehow partially to his vulnerability before a violent god whom he does not

trust but who is unbearably relational. For in calling God to meet him face-to-face, “on the dust,”

Job implies that he and God are both vulnerable, linked through God’s decision to delve his

hands into the dust to create humans.69

Looking briefly at Job 19:26b-27 and incorporating Levinas’ insights, Carol Newsom

concludes that:

In imagining such an encounter, Job negotiates the dangerous terrain of alterity [between God and humanity] by establishing the common ground upon which the divine and the human can meet – the ground of justice. Job’s strategy is indeed to reduce the alterity of the divine and the human by stressing the common moral nature of God and human beings… Job is determined to bring into the light what [the friends’] formulation tacitly assumes but represses, namely, the continuity between God and himself.70


68 Butler, An Account, 77.

69 God forms ʾādām from the dust of the ground (Gen 2:7). To animate the human mold, God breathes God’s breath into it. Without the breath of God, humans are merely dust; therefore to die is to “return to dust” (Gen 3:19; Ps 104:29; Job 10:7; 34:15; Ecc 3:20; 12:7). Thus, dust is used figuratively for the grave (Pss 22:15, 29; 30:9; Dan 12:2), and the “house of dust” refers to the Netherworld in Akkadian (bît epri; cf. also, 17(2 Aqht). I.29). Dying may be described as lying down in the dust (Job 7:21; 20:11; 21:26) and the dead as “dwellers in the dust” (šōknê ʿāpār, Isa 26:19). Dust also functions as a symbol of human frailty (Ps 103:14; Job 4:19) and the transitoriness of human life (Ps 90:3). Humans express their inferior position vis-à-vis God by identifying themselves with dust (Gen 18:27; Job 30:19). Similar self-abasement formulae appear in the Amarna letters, in which vassals refer to themselves as “the dust of the feet of the king” (i.e., EA 248:5). Licking the dust of someone’s feet expresses total submission (Isa 49:23; cf Ps 72:9; Mic 7:17). That Job imagines meeting God “on the dust” speaks to his desire to see God on common ground.

70 Newsom, A Contest of Moral Imaginations, 150.



The kind of transformation evident in Job 19 does not lie in gaining power or rediscovering faith

in a transcendent deity; rather it depicts Job’s surrender of such desires (to have power over an

other, to have faith in God). The poetry of Job 19 reveals that acquiring and maintaining power

and orthodox faith requires violence to maintain. As terrible as this other is who stands before

him, Job does not recoil from God; rather he responds to the injury inflicted upon him in a way

that heightens his own humanity and challenges God to respond in kind. He does not lash out

with violence or self-defense; rather he outrageously performs the vulnerability that lies at the

core of his humanity and his understanding of the deity.

I want to return now to the concept of agency. I indicated in the first part of this article

that Job accesses agency in a way that does not resort to violence. The idea of Job’s passivity or

surrender that I have just proposed may seem contradictory to my earlier claims about Job’s

agency and resistance. However, Levinas’ concept of agency is intertwined with his notion of

radical passivity.71 For Levinas, passivity is a condition of ethical agency: a self rooted in egoism

and freedom cannot become a responsible or ethical self.72

Conclusion: Resistance and Surrender

Job’s presentation or offer of a radically different form of subjectivity – of a transformed

self – incorporates elements of resistance and surrender. Responsibility or ethical grounding in a


71 Levinas writes, “responsibility for the other... is a passivity more passive than all passivity, an exposure to the other without this exposure being assumed, an exposure without holding back, exposure of exposedness, expression, saying.” Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Boston: Nijhoff, 1981), 15.

72 Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Phaenomenologica, vol. 100; trans. Alphonso Lingis; Boston: Nijhoff, 1987), 145.



self formed in this way cannot be accounted for by Butler’s work alone. However, in the work of

Emmanuel Levinas, there is a concept of responsibility grounded in a similar dichotomy.

Although Levinas’ notion of responsibility as total submission to the other resonates deeply with

Butler’s work, in his work on Ezekiel, Levinas’ original ideas are somewhat modified and allude

to a slightly different idea of responsibility. Martin Srajek argues that Levinas draws on Ezekiel

in order to modify his view that responsibility can be achieved only through absolute submission

to the other. Srajek maintains that responsibility can occur “only if – like Ezekiel – we resist and

thereby acknowledge the significance of the otherness of God and our neighbor.”73 He goes on to

say that:

Looking at Ezekiel will allow us to see that –though passivity is an important foundational criterion for Levinas—responsibility is predicated on acts of interpretation and resistance. Levinas’ use of Ezekiel enriches his notion of the face-to-face encounter with the other by allowing one to go beyond an understanding of this encounter, which conceives of it as mere slavery and obsession, toward one that, indeed, asks for responsibility.74

Job’s language in chapter 19 enacts resistance, not only to the violent acts of God but also

to the dominant means of theologizing suffering. And yet, Job also models surrender and a

defiant embrace of vulnerability before God, the ultimate other. In this space between resistance

and surrender, Job realizes responsibility, in that he does not advocate or speak violence against

the face of the other – be that God or his enemy. Thus, an ethical self, even a transformed self,

emerges through the poetry of Job 19.


73 Martin C. Srajek, “Constitution and Agency in Light of Some Passages from Ezekiel 1-4: A Re-reading of Levinas,” in T. C. Eskenazi, G. A. Phillips, D. Jobling eds. Levinas and Biblical Studies (SBL Semeia Studies, 43; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2003), 125-144 (125).

74 Ibid., 127.



"Resistance and Surrender: The Self in Job 19."

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