Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth (review)

Abstract

Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth, by Susannah Ticciati. London/New York: TT he discovers his singular individuality (and the pain that accompanies it); he confronts the alterity that defines both his own person and God Godself. Most importantly, in the Whirlwind Speeches, Job learns that the law is subsequent to God's gratuitous act of creation-[God's] election of Job 'for naught' (p. 111). In part three, sticking close to the original Hebrew, Ticciari identifies Job as a prophetic figure engaged in a legal debate with God. This identification once more shows the adequacy of integrity as an interpretive category, for Job discovers himself as elect. Finally, Ticciati returns to the theological issues of part one. Rejecting again Earth's (putative) tendency to dichotomize the and the eschatological, Ticciati commends Job as descriptive of a human life in the process of being transformed. In the disruption of his identity by God, Job beholds his own singularity and election; he realizes that self is the process of its probing (p. 167); he understands that he lives in medias res, encompassed by the and the eschatological, by the human and the divine. This discussion allows Ticciati to gesture towards a historical ontology (pp. 170ff) that discerns ongoing transformation as basic to human being, creation as a whole, and the divine life itself. Although the nuances of this text cannot be adequately considered in a brief review (I will, in particular, defer comment on Ticciati's handling of the Hebrew and her perhaps controversial emphasis on the role of covenant in Job), there is no doubt as to its importance. On one level, categories such as disruption, integrity, and election illumine the enigmatic world of Job. …