Austin, "Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem" (reviewed by Julie J. Nichols)

Review
======

Title: Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World’s Greatest Poem
Author: Michael Austin
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Scripture exegesis
Year of Publication: 2014
Number of Pages: 422
Binding: paper (Also available in e-book for Amazon Kindle, Kobo eReader, and Barnes and Noble Nook)
ISBN13: 978-1-58958-667-3
Price: $20.95

Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters

I taught Job in my Sunday School Gospel Doctrine class last week. I’d been reading Margaret Barker’s *The Older Testament,* where I’d learned that Job was a much more complicated matter than simply an old story of a man plagued by Satan to win a bet with God. Barker’s thesis is that the Deuteronomists suppressed—all but destroyed—certain ways of thinking that predated them (typical behavior for those in power), and that the debates in Chapters 3-29 of Job, which are left out of most Sunday School readings of the book, bear traces of the tension of that transition from older thought to the Deuteronomist focus on Law and individual responsibility. I was already eager to teach these deeper readings of Job.

So when the opportunity arose to review Michael Austin’s new book I jumped at the chance. Austin, who has a PhD in English Literature from the University of California, has published seven books, among them analyses of New Testament typology and of the debates of the Founding Fathers. *Re-reading Job* is the second volume in Kofford’s *Contemporary Studies In Scripture* series, which looks to be (as the first volume has been described) “a must for those seeking to incorporate the best of biblical scholarship in their personal or professional scripture study” (from the Kofford Books website). Forthcoming titles look as intriguing as *Job,* addressing debates that current scholarship continues to update and hone. Austin’s book is a standard-bearer; if the others are as pleasing as this one, I’ll buy them all.

It’s an eminently holdable, physically comfortable book, to begin with, and pleasing to look at, only 9”x6”x½”, with a ghostly, sienna-shaded image of Job by seventeenth-century painter Jan Lievens between slim burgundy borders. I enjoyed holding it as much as I enjoyed reading it. Kofford is to be commended on their choice of cover, both images and textile materials.

But what’s inside has to be commendable too, and *Re-reading Job* is unquestionably that. The first paragraphs of Chapter One, “Six Things I Used to Know About Job,” are eminently readable. We’re hooked. Austin tells the stories of three times he read the book of Job as a youth and how it took years, and college classes in the Bible as literature, for him to recognize the book for what it is: a poem with as much literary sophistication (allusion, irony, commentary, imagery, beautiful language) as anything in the library we call the Bible. Even if we’re not readers of literature as well as readers of scripture, but especially if we are, we’re compelled to read on. We want to know more. And we feel acknowledged—Austin is adamant that he’s writing to an LDS audience that may have been taught Job in conventional (not necessarily literary) ways all our lives. He means to show us what we might learn about Job not only from a scholarly standpoint, but from a faithful one.

Austin provides a useful diagram of the structure of Job at the beginning of his book. It shows that Chapters 1-2 and 42 are a frame story, probably from Persia, long known to the Hebrews, just as much lore is known to us without our needing to pin down its origins or historicity. Austin addresses the question of Job’s being a “real person” early on as he discusses the role of literature as a bearer of real truths whether or not they are factual. Everyone knows what a Scrooge is, though Scrooge never lived except in the pages of a Dickens novel. It’s probable that readers of Job knew the story of the man whose wealth, and then whose health, was taken from him in a wager between God and “Satan.” That story is what Austin (and Barker, and most OT scholars) call the frame. The forty chapters between the bookends in the Old Testament version are a poem, consisting of several dialogues between Job and three friends; a speech by Job himself; a long speech by a fourth “friend” who seems to come out of nowhere; and then a speech by God, wrapping all else up. This poem profoundly recasts and interrogates the frame, much as a modern-day feminist (say) might interrogate the Disney version of “Cinderella.”

To explain: Everyone knows the elements of the Disney version—the much maligned beautiful stepdaughter, the fairy godmother, the slipper that fits, the happy ending. Everyone also knows, to some extent, that this is a cleanup of a much harder-to-take tale in which a good mother dies, the cruel stepmother requires harsh tasks, and the greedy stepsisters cut off their own limbs to make the golden slippers fit. A fine feminist poet might insert a number of voices into a transcript of the Disney version protesting Cinderella’s ultra-sweetness, the prince’s ultra-handsomeness, the mice’s cute charm. Those voices might also point our attention not only to the heroine’s greatness of heart, the very real injustices she must endure, and her indebtedness to magic and to other-dimensional helpers who could not have come if her character had been less fine. In the same way, the poet of the Job we have in the Old Testament interrogates and emphasizes aspects of the frame story that the story itself does play up.

S/He does so by means of three friends who come to sit with Job. Austin shows how their ways of “comforting” Job in his grief are relevant in themselves. In part, this is a poem about relationship—how *not* to comfort a friend in need.

But I think more importantly this is a poem about humans’ relationship to God, and to Wisdom. In clear, easy-to-follow (though not at all dumbed-down) prose, Austin shows that each of the three friends, who talk in turn with Job about why he’s suffered the losses inflicted upon him, seems to be asking him to reconsider his relationship with God. Austin emphasizes the beauty of the language—not its easiness, but its patterns, images, and recall of other “Writings” (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in particular). During my Sunday School class last week, I let some of my class members role-play the three friends, and was honored to have a literary man act as Job, reading Job’s responses to his apparently insensitive friends in a sympathetic and melodic rendering. You will be rewarded, as you read Austin’s exegesis, by reading aloud the verses to which he refers.

Austin analyzes the debates between Job’s “friends” and Job; the Hymn to Wisdom in Job 28; the “odd bits” that seem to be interpolations by later compilers (so that we have interpolations to an interpolation, commentaries on a commentary on the original frame story); and God’s speech from the whirlwind. Rather than summarize these analyses I will merely commend them as scholarly, lucid, and literary. You may argue with them, but Austin lays out the scholarship in such a way that Job is suddenly far more interesting than before, and twice as “spiritual.” Now it’s not just a homily to being obedient so that after you’ve suffered you can get your reward in the end. It’s a poem about interrogating who you are in relation to God; the value of questioning; the relationship of your questioning to the current orthodoxy; and the absolute need to know yourself in relation to God and your friends.

The Book of Job epitomizes the “Wisdom literature” of which Psalms and the Song of Solomon are also a part—a non-unified thread of ancient Hebrew thinking that contrasts and complements the History books and the teachings of the Prophetic books. It’s a book with a history and a meaning. Why it made its way into the Old Testament is a question you may chew upon even after you finish Austin’s book. He says it’s because the OT is much more than a random collection of books, that its compilers were fair in bringing in literature outside of their Deuteronomist chronology or the Priestly prophetic works. Job is as important as those, and deserves the kind of analysis Austin brings to the table.

Fully annotated and well-supported, *Re-reading Job* is a book to supplement your Old Testament reading this year in Sunday School and any time you want to consider the complexities of scripture. We have much to thank Kofford books for. If this is any indication, we can look forward eagerly to the upcoming titles in this series!