Job and the Bible’s Theo-Political Divide
The Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel
Religions 2019, 10(1), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010033
Received: 3 December 2018 / Revised: 2 January 2019 / Accepted: 3 January 2019 / Published: 6 January 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Book of Job: A Challenge for the Rationality of Judaism, Christianity and Islam)
The book of Job presents a unique and detailed contrastive study of two fundamental and fundamentally opposed religious personae: Job, on the one hand, and the collective image of his friends on the other. It is a normative dispute about the religion’s most basic norm of disposition. How is one to respond to inexplicable disaster when one believes one is blameless? What is the religiously appropriate response to catastrophe? To confront God’s judgment as did Job, or to submissively surrender to it, as his four friends insist he should? Is one supposed to question divine justice when deemed to be wanting, as did Job, or to suppress any thought to the contrary and deem it to be just, come what may? Rather than expound (once again) upon the theological implications of the Job dispute, this paper focuses on its theological-political dimensions, and its looming and vivid, yet largely overlooked presence in the Hebrew Bible’s master narrative; and more specifically, on the marked, if inevitable antinomian nature of the Jobian side to the divide.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Fisch, M. Job and the Bible’s Theo-Political Divide. Religions 2019, 10, 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010033
AMA Style
Fisch M. Job and the Bible’s Theo-Political Divide. Religions. 2019; 10(1):33. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010033
Chicago/Turabian StyleFisch, Menachem. 2019. "Job and the Bible’s Theo-Political Divide" Religions 10, no. 1: 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010033
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