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Have You Considered My Servant Job? - Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience (Hardcover)
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Have You Considered My Servant Job? - Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience (Hardcover)
Series: Studies on Personalities of the Old Testament
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The question that launches Job's story is posed by God at the
outset of the story: "Have you considered my servant Job?" (1:8;
2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes.
The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact
opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading,
evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators
emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church
Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval
Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal
interpretations of God's providential love. Artists, beginning at
least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own
interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and
musicians - religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of
the globe - have added their own distinctive readings. In Have You
Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich
and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal
characters in the story - Job, God, the satan figure, Job's wife,
and Job's friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of
the biblical description of these characters, then explores how
subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its
major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as
fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or
dismissed them as irrelevant. Each new generation of readers is
shaped by different historical, cultural, and political contexts,
which in turn require new interpretations of an old yet continually
mesmerizing story. Voltaire read Job one way in the eighteenth
century, Herman Melville a different way in the nineteenth century.
Goethe's reading of the satan figure in Faust is not the same as
Chaucer's in The Canterbury Tales, and neither is fully consonant
with the Testament of Job or the Qur'an. One need only compare the
descriptions of God in the biblical account with the imaginative
renderings by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka to see
that the effort to understand why God afflicts Job "for no reason"
(2:3) continues to be both compelling and endlessly complicated.
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